Quicktime's "Export for Web" Mystery

[Ben Winter]

Here's something that's been stumping me for a while...

I frequently have to export my edits and post them for others to review, and right now my easiest method is to open the video file and use quicktime's "Export for Web" option in the menu. I use the iPhone preset and for a short two-minute video it usually spits out a file in under a minute.

But when I export the file using Quicktime 7's "Export" option, or even use Compressor, so I can tweak quality and size, the export takes many times longer, at least ten minutes!

The "Export for Web" option lists a few scant details about each preset; namely, it's H.264 and 1.5 Mbits/sec for the Desktop option. But when I try to reproduce these settings in Compressor or in the regular Export menu, the file not only takes 10x longer to encode, the quality is 10x worse!

As I write this, I've waited 20 minutes for a 3-minute video to render out using Compressor's "Youtube Sharing" preset, something Quicktime's "Export for Web" option would have done in about 5 minutes.

What's going on?