General
Storage Locations
- Prompt for filename: As you process each movie you will be prompted for the location and name of the output movie.
- Create files in same folder: The output movie is saved within the same folder as the source movie. The name of the preset is appended to the end of the filename. Your source footage is never overwritten in Stomp. No existing output file is overwritten. If the file exists, a unique number is appended to the end of the filename.
- Create files in specified folder: This uses the same file naming rules as above (in that no file is overwritten), but the movie is stored in a location of your choosing. In the example above all movies would be saved to the Desktop
Temporary files
Stomp create quite a few temporary files during processing. If you're running out of space, or simply wish Stomp to use some other drive for it's scratch data, you can specify that here.
Other options
- Select files added to the video list: When you Save As... or drag a file into Stomp, it'll automatically be selected.
- Always try to extend video to the end: Sometimes audio tracks can be longer than the video track. If you would like Stomp to tidy up the video so that it ends exactly when the audio does, enable this option. Stomp will extend the duration of the last video frame so that it ends at the same time as the audio.
- Use Growl: If you want to have Stomp send notifications through Growl, enable this. Stomp will notify you when it completes processing of some video.
- Preview Panel always on top: Enable this if you wish the preview (the "what it is now, what it will become" panel) panel to be on top of all other windows.
- Automatically Check for updates on Startup: Stomp checks to see if a newer version is available each time you start it.
Performance
Stomp can process many files at once. It does this by running separate "server" programs in the background. Here you can control how many programs it allows to run at once. Running more will give you more parallelism if you're processing many videos in a batch, and the expense of using more CPU and slowing down other tasks on your system.
The option to "be nice", if ticked, makes Stomp run these programs so that all other programs on your computer get priority. If you're computers not doing much, then the Stomp compressors will run at full speed. If some other program wants to run, it'll get priority over the Stomp compressor. This is turned on by default.
Support
If you need to provide feedback to shinywhitebox regarding Stomp, you'll likely be asked to come here and turn on some debugging options. Turning on General Logging causes Stomp and it's compressor servers to spit out potentially (depending on the number of sub options you enable) lots of debugging information to the Console.
All of the options here are really only relevant for support of the product. They don't enable extra features that are useful to you (sorry about that!).
Other options
- Use other alternate compression method: Only use this if requested by support. It's in there in case the primary method has a fault with some component in the future and we need to test it against QuickTime. Don't enable this normally as it'll disable CoreImage filter processing as well.
- Perform compression in-process: If you don't want Stomp to spawn off server processes in the background, turn this on. Stomp will then queue up all it's work inside the UI. This means that while it is still doing batch mode, only one compression task will run at once (nothing in parallel).
- Don't remove the temporary files at the end of compression: Most definitely for debugging! Enabling this makes Stomp leave all it's scratch files behind. Again, useful for support but not something you want to enable unless you like going out any buying larger hard drives every couple of weeks.
- Draw crop outline: Only enable if support requests you do so.