Jeff Greenberg of Future Media Concepts did a great job of presenting a lot of information in a short amount of time at his session titled Video Compression on a Mac. Here’s 5 tips I liked:

1. Job chaining in Apple Compressor is a key to better looking outputs. Under the Job menu > New Job With Target Output will allow you to scale video to a smaller resolution in its own step before doing the encode.

2. A shallow depth of field with a blurry background will compress better than deep depth of field. This made perfect sense when he said it since fast motion and busy frames always make for more blocky compression. I had never thought of that.

3. Always deinterlance in your compression software and not your editor. And never use the deinterlace filter in Apple Compressor. Always do deinterlacing in the Frame Controls tab of the inspector.

4. You can drag an old job from the History window of Compressor back into the Batch window to re-encode again.

5. MainConcept Reference is a new and promising encoding application available for Mac, Windows and Linux.