About Compress Movies

Compress Movies is a free utility for MacOS X and Windows will batch compress video clips into any available QuickTime format. Just drag the existing clips on to the application, set the compression format, and Compress Movies will recompress all of the clips into the specified format.

The source clips can be in any format that QuickTime understands. This utility is particularly useful for Windows users of Isadora who want to compress DV-AVI files into lower resolution formats.

Instructions

1. Drag the video clips on to the Compress Movies application.
2. The "Movie Settings" dialog will appear. Then do the following:
3. Video Section:
1. Make sure the check box labeled "Video" at the top of the dialog is checked.
2. Click on the Settings... button
3. In the first pop-up menu in the section labeled "Compressor" choose the compression format you wish for use with the compressed movies. TroikaTronix recommends Photo-JPEG for best performance – these files can be somewhat big, but Photo-JPEG requrest less processor power to decompress.
4. In the section labeled "Quality" use the slider to set a compression factor of Medium or High. Using Medium produces somewhat smaller files, but is more grainy. Using High produces less grainy files, but they are somewhat larger.
5. In the section labeled "Motion", choose "Current" in the popup menu to the right of "Frame Rate". This will cause the exported movie's frame rate to match the source movie. Note: you can choose a lower frame rate (i.e. 12 or 15, etc.) to reduce the size of the movie and increase performance – but do this only if you have problems playing movies at the normal frame rate.
6. Click OK to confirm these settings.
7. Click on the Size... button to show the Export Size Settings dialog box
8. In the popup menu, choose "Custom"
9. Set the desired resoultion in the Width & Height text boxes. TroikaTronix recommends setting the width to 320 and the height to 240 for best performance, but you may set this to any resolution you desire.
10. Click OK to confirm this dialog.
4. Sound Section:
1. If your movie does not have sound, make sure the check box over the section labeled "Sound" is not checked and skip to the section below called "Saving the Movie". Otherwise, check it and follow the instructions below
2. In the section labeled "Video" click on the Settings... button
3. In the pop up menu labeled "Compressor" choose None.
4. Set the Rate pop menu to 44.1 KHz
5. Set the Size radio button to 16.
6. Set the Use radio button to Stereo or Mono, as appropriate.
7. Click OK to confirm this dialog.
5. Finally, click OK to confirm the "Movie Settings" dialog. Once you do, Compress Movies will recompress all of the movies you iniitially dragged on to the application.