What makes these results even more significant is that Compressor is the underlying compression technology for Apple Final Cut Pro X, just as Adobe Media Encoder is the underlying compression foundation for Adobe Premiere Pro CC. The GPU is almost never used in most video compression.An upgraded Mac mini is a powerhouse video compression engine.

In a head-to-head contest with Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder generally wins for speed and file size.

With only limited exceptions Apple Compressor is the slowest compression software and also generates the largest compressed files.

The hands-down performance champion is ffWorks/ffMPEG.

The results were surprising and worth sharing. Over three days this holiday weekend, I compared compression speed and file size between Apple Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder and ffWorks/ffMPEG running on a high-performance 27″ iMac and the new Mac mini.

Using the default YouTube, or social media, setting is a fast and good way to maintain image quality throughout. This means that you need to create a file with “extra bits” so that when it is recompressed the image quality is not overly degraded. NOTE: When sending a file to YouTube, or any social media service, it is important to remember that each of these services recompresses the file. Given those two goals, I wondered what were the differences, if any, in performance and file size between different popular media compression software. So, our goals in compressing any media file are to make it as small as possible, while damaging image and audio quality as little as possible. If network bandwidth was not limited, we wouldn’t need to compress a file because an uncompressed file will always look and sound better than a compressed file.

The reason we compress a media file is that we need to make it smaller so that it can be rapidly transferred across a network.

Ffmpeg mp4 to prores