The source is a real 5-minute segment of Tears of Steel, a live-action short film ((C) Blender Foundation, mango.blender.org, CC BY 3.0), not a synthetic test pattern. QuickCompress's Smaller mode compressed it locally on a MacBook Pro (Apple M1 Pro), using Apple's VideoToolbox hardware encoder.
The whole run, probing the source, planning a bitrate, and encoding, took 15.7s. Nothing left the Mac at any point: the file was read from disk, encoded locally, and written back to disk.
Same timestamp, both frames, extracted directly from the source and output files.
Quality observation: Smaller mode targets a bitrate derived from the source's own resolution and frame rate, not a fixed compression ratio, so it aims to keep quality close to the original rather than always hitting the same percentage. A source already encoded efficiently for its resolution may see little size reduction: QuickCompress will tell you that upfront rather than compress it anyway.
- Environment
- MacBook Pro (Apple M1 Pro), macOS 26.5.2
- QuickCompress
- Pre-release build (v1.0.0, unreleased)
- Encoder
- Apple's VideoToolbox hardware encoder
- Source
- 1280x534, 300.1 seconds (5:00), 156.8 MB
- Source codecs
- H.264 video (~4.0 Mbps), MP3 audio (192 kbps)
A real 5-minute segment of a live-action short film (real actors, real VFX). It runs the real production probing and planning code, then the exact bundled FFmpeg sidecar QuickCompress ships, so the result reflects the app itself, not a simulation of it. Every number on this page comes from a test you can run yourself:
QC_REAL_SOURCE=fixtures/real-benchmarks/real_liveaction_clip.mp4 \
cargo test --test real_world_benchmark measures_the_smaller_strategy -- --ignored --nocaptureSource video: (C) Blender Foundation, mango.blender.org, CC BY 3.0 (https://mango.blender.org/)
Results vary by source video: motion, resolution, starting bitrate, and Mac model all affect how much a specific file shrinks and how long it takes. Treat this as one measured data point, not a universal claim.
Curious how a different kind of source compresses? See the animated video compression test, or how QuickCompress hits an exact file size in the target-size accuracy test.