What does Stomp do?  

Well, in short it's a compressor for audio and video.  It takes QuickTime compatible files as input and creates QuickTime compatible files as output.

Re-compression is the process of taking all the frames of one video and recreating them in another format. The typical usage is to compress a "raw" format like ProRes or Apple Intermediate into something more suitable for the web such as H264.

Another example would be if you you would also need to recompress video if you wanted to get an iShowU clip (say, from YouTube) and have it playable on an iPhone.

Movies have both audio and video, and Stomp lets you process each of these individually or not at all. For example you can choose to leave video alone while recompressing the video frames to a different format.

To give you an idea, the following conversions are just some of those that are possible:

• Apple Animation -> H264
• MPEG4 -> H264
• 720p DV footage -> WMV (if you have purchased the WMV Flip4Mac component)
• Stripping audio from a movie
• 1080p HD -> 720p (any format)
• Any movie -> iPhone format
• Any movie -> Leaving the video alone but recompressing audio to AAC.
• Any movie -> Turbo H264 (if you have the device from Elgato

The above are just examples to give you an idea of the possibilities.  What else does it do? Here's a summary of the major features.

Cropping

Ever wanted to crop a video like you can a picture? Well now you can - and easily!

Easy to use

A major goal of Stomp was to make it easy to use. If you've ever used some other other tools out there you'll know that they often ask you to enter things like offsets for cropping manually. We wanted to make video compression and cropping / fixing something that anyone could do. It should be a matter of dropping videos in, changing a couple of easy options and clicking Go.

Batch mode

Stomp can process more than one file at once.  This is covered in more detail when we explain the user interface, but it's mentioned here because it's one of the more powerful features of Stomp.  Just select a bunch of videos, hit "process" and go make dinner.

Filtering

Stomp is able to use any number of CoreImage filters during image processing. This means that you can apply gamma fixes and other color corrections very easily.