projects

COMPRESSOR SETTINGS

Fast and efficient settings for Apple Compressor H.264 web encoding.

A set of presets for encoding H.264 video using Jan Ozer's bitrate recommendations and Fabio Sonnatti's encoder recommendations, at least as far as Fabio's recommended options are enabled in Apple Compressor.

The presets come in 3 groups, two sets for 23.976 and 29.97 and one group for fast encoding for web delivery.

23.976 and 29.97 groups have the following set of encodes:

• 640x360
• 960x640
• 1280x720
• 1920x1080

The Fabio Fast group is for the leanest, meanest and fastest encoding possible, and can still perform with pretty low bandwidth requirements. It uses an oddball frame size, 1024x576, because one of the tricks of efficient H.264 encoding is using a pixel size that is easily divisible by 16 (1024 dived by 16 is 64, 576 divided by 16 is 36), so the math on the 16x16 macroblock partition size is easy to do and quick. Fabio Fast is for gettin' it done. It comes in 23.976 and 29.97 as well as Auto, for automatically detecting frame rate when you just want a drag and drop. Bitrate is set to 1414 to 1768 kbps, which might just play back on a good data plan in Iran (which it did when I was encoding class recordings for a remote grad student in physics).

See my original article for more information and samples.

Installing

Unzip and drag into Compressor's settings sidebar, folder and everything. You can also add them as destinations in FCPX.