Compressor is built for one task—compressing. Obviously, there's a bit more to it than that with enough compression variables to make your eyes roll into the back of your head, but let's get a good peek at the body before getting under the hood.
If you haven't purchased Compressor, open up your Mac App Store application and purchase it for $49.99.
1. In FCPX, open a project that you are 100 percent satisfied with and is ready for completion.
2. Choose Share | Send to Compressor to open Compressor. The interface is split up into five major areas, each highlighted in the following diagram. (If your screen doesn't look similar to the one in the following screenshot, choose Window | Layouts and then pick the Standard setting with a resolution closest to the resolution of your monitor.)
i. Section 1: This is your Batch window. It contains a list of jobs. In the previous image, the one item labeled TBS — Episode 2 is the job. In this case, the job at hand is the project we just sent over from FCPX. Compressor can operate totally independently from FCPX, allowing users to drag-and-drop any video files from Finder right into this part of the interface to create jobs, but for these exercises we'll create the job based upon our work in FCPX.
ii. Section 2: This is the Settings window. Here is where we can browse all the presets in Compressor, including ones we'll make ourselves in a later exercise. When you find a setting you want to use, simply drag-and-drop it on top of the job in the batch window. You can also click on the Destinations tab to select a destination for a job.
iii. Section 3: This is the Inspector window. Although it is very different from Inspector windows in both FCPX and Motion, the concept remains the same. This window allows you to finely tune the details of your compression settings for a job. When you first send a project to Compressor, it will likely display Nothing Selected.
3. Click on the one job in the batch window:
The Inspector window now displays some options and information about the job you've highlighted. We'll go over these in a bit more detail in later exercises:
i. Section 4: This is the Preview window. It functions similarly to the Viewers in FCPX and Motion. As we highlighted a job in the batch window, the preview now displays our FCPX project. The Preview window will let us add chapter markers (which we will do in the next recipe) and preview how our video will look using different presets.
ii. Section 5: This is the History window. It displays a log of all exports for a particular batch. This can be handy in large projects where you may want to re-export a particular job with slightly different settings.