The Gear Menu

Most of the built-in presets use what is know as "QuickTime Compression".  This means that the compressor is using built-in quicktime video formats, such as H264, MPEG4, Apple Intermediate, Apple Animation and so on.   However not all compressors use the same settings dialogs and this can be confusing. 

Broadly speaking, the settings presented to you are split into two main groups.

1. Everything that "QuickTime" does (H264, MPEG4, AIC, AA, etc).  Essentially this is anything that can be setup using the dialog (the one with the massive dropdown) below.
2. Additional third party compressors, with their own settings dialogs and controls (a good example is the DivX compressor). All of these are represented in Stomp from the gear dropdown menu.

You can tell if you're looking at the standard QuickTime settings dialog.  It looks something like this one, with a dropdown at the top providing a large list of video compressor types and options:

So if you're staring at a vidoe settings dialog with a large dropdown menu like the one on the right, you're looking at a standard built in QuickTime settings panel.

This computer has Final Cut installed and so there are likely more codecs listed than on another machine without FCP installed.

Why is this important?

It's important for two reasons. First because Stomp cannot control the settings of "specialist" compressors from the normal settings panel. You must use the settings dialogs provided by the component provider. Secondly that the user interface changes as a result, and you may have to look for options in a place that you don't expect.

For example, you'll see that DivX is not an option in the list above, even though I've got the DivX component installed.  This is because it's not a standard QuickTime compressor type.

However, if I click the gear icon, you'll see that the DivX component is listed there.  All of the third party installed compressors (and a couple of the built-in special Apple ones) are listed under the gear icon.

If you add a new preset of type DivX, you'll notice that the bulk of the Stomp options are now disabled.

This is because DivX is a third party compressor that gets it's settings from a different place to the other components. Annoying, yes.

So if you wanted to replicate the resize operation that we performed earlier, how would you do it since the Change video size option is disabled?  You have to click on the Settings... button for video and change the options within the compressor itself. For DivX this is done as follows: