I compress video as a profession, using Episode Encoder, ffmpeg, Adobe Media Encoder, and Compressor.
Of the three, Episode is the fastest, AME is the most convenient and fairly fast, and Compressor is unreliable for a production environment and requires the most supervision and troubleshooting.
The latest version is a big improvement. However, there are still problems.
- Unresponsive beachball for 30secs-2 mins.
- Failed encodes
- Hassles with submitting jobs to cluster
— Job fails completely
— File not found errors
— Cluster computers idle when they should be processing
- There is no batch send from Final Cut as there was in FCP 7, and is in Premiere
- There are no file-naming output options as found in other encoders
- There is no post-processing e.g. FTP upload
I frequently share feedback with Apple and have worked with them to resolve many problems, but they are slow to update the app and the slowness remains.