Creating Compressor Droplets

By Jeff Davenport

When viewing a movie on the web You’ve probably asked yourself on numerous occasions, “How did they get that movie to look so good?”

The answer is that they probably used Apple’s Compressor software to do it.

When you are finished editing your movie, the next step is to convert it to a delivery format that best suits your needs. For example maybe a mobile device such as an iPod or iPhone, the Web or even a DVD.

You can compress your movies individually as you finish them using compressor. However, if you want to convert multiple movies in few simple steps, the best way is to use a droplet.

Droplets are tiny programs that save compression settings, so all you have to do it drag your movie into the droplet, click a few times and let your computer go to work converting your video.

To create a droplet, open Compressor and select the the preset that you want to use. Then click on the “Save Selection as Droplet” button.

You can then save the droplet anywhere on your hard drive and give it any name you want. By default, all the converted movies will be saved in the same location as the original (the Source).

Once the droplet is saved, you can quit Compressor. Drag and drop the movies that you want to be converted directly over the droplet (you can also add the droplet to the Dock).

The droplet automatically opens. A list of the clips that are ready to be converted appears on the lefthand side of the window. The name of the converted movies will contain the same name as the original, followed by the setting (in this case H.264 for iPod video and iPhone 640x480).

Click submit to give the batch (the group of movies that are being converted) a name. Then click submit again. The droplet closes and your clips are encoded in the background. This means that you can do other tasks on your computer without interfering with the process.

You’re probably thinking, “How do I know when my batch of movies is done?” The answer is another program named Batch Monitor. It is located in Applications/Utilities. Once it’s open, click on “This Computer” along the left hand side to monitor the progress of your batch.

Adding droplets makes it simple to convert multiple movies to any desired format.

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