A new, Compressor related job

I need to brush up on my encoding skills with Compressor, Media encoder, and MPEG Streamclip. It seems that i may have a job next week with a place...(hoping, hoping, hoping). 80% of my duties will be converting/compressing films/video for mobile use. 20 to 25 % of the time will be editing for MAJOR brands for mobile use!!!! Anyone know of where I should start? I've of course used the presets...but we're going to go a bit beyond that realm I've been told. i would assume getting into the tweaking of bit rate and such. i know it's kind of an art and a bunch of trial and error.

Hi Don,

I hope you do get this job! High quality compression is indeed mainly trial and error. You can only start tweaking efficiently once you exactly know what your target destinations and formats will be and you know what kind of media you will have to work with.

When you have samples of the original media and you know to what kind of platforms you will have to encode to then you can start doing test encodes and watch how they play on your target platforms. You can start with presets and continue tweaking them until you get the best quality vs. file size relation for every different platform. Different durations will also require different custom settings for optimal performance. But if this is a long time job it is definitely worth investing time in it.

- Ronny

There is a book that applies to Compressor 4, that I highly recommend anyone using Compressor 3 or 4 get. Tons of very valuable information that will take a lot of guess work out of your settings.
"Apple Pro Training Series: Compressor 3.5"