I'm curious what people are using on macs with Catalina or Big Sur to do movie codec format conversion. So what are you using?
Apple's ill-named QuicktimePlayer (ill-named because it does not use the Quicktime api) gives you some brain dead (in my opinion) options detailed here. The only options you appear to have are H.264 and H.265. Am i missing something here?
So what are people using to do more general codec conversions? Or are they forcing people to buy Final Cut if you want to have more choices?
Replies
Final Cut Pro works and can be pretty fast at converting clips, but for some reason, I tend not to use it for most of my conversion jobs. I think it's because I don't want to create and manage a library. for just converting clips. It's a $300 expense that definitely can be overkill if you're using it just for conversion.
EditReady does a pretty decent job of transcoding and it's pretty fast and simple to use. It's $50 which might be steep if you only use it every blue moon.
Compressor is $50 as well and I find that it works well also but I don't use it all that often.
I've also made use of Kyno's ($150) built-in tools as I find it's faster and convenient to do it in the app rather than farm it off to another application. It's ultimately a MAM (Media Asset Manager) so maybe overkill for folks that only want to use it for small conversion jobs.
Adobe's Media Encoder works fine (though I'm avoiding using Adobe whenever I possibly can.) If you're using the creative cloud it's an available option but I wouldn't sign up just to use it. (variable cost depending on which subscription model you sign up for.)
DaVinci Resolve is a swiss army knife that plays well with a lot of formats. As it's free, I think it's worth having in the toolkit.
Blender is also a free swiss army knife. The learning curve could be a barrier to entry for some, but I find it useful in some instances.
Haven't used handbrake or Mpeg Streamclip (both free) in many years so I don't know how they play on Big Sur.
Handbrake is my tool of choice.