Stomp Review: Advanced Video Converting

A while ago, we talked about Techspansion closing its doors. As you may know, Techspansion was the maker of a great audio and great video converter. We also talked about many alternatives to VisualHub and AudialHub (their products). One we did not talk about, is shinywhitebox‘s Stomp. That is what I will talk about today.

Stomp’s main purpose is to convert your videos to a large variety of formats. It comes built-in with 20 presets, but you can change the conversion settings as you wish. To change the settings for the audio or video, just click the Settings… button by the relevant label. You will then be prompted with a window that gives you many conversion options. You can also choose to leave the video or audio untouched or delete it altogether from the movie. Of course, you can also change the size and crop the video too. When you have chosen all the options you need, all you have to do is click the Process button in the lower right-hand-corner. However, unlike an app like Handbrake, you cannot click on an item in the list, and change conversion settings for just that clip. You must change it for them all, convert, and then do it again for different options.

Stomp’s other main feature is Filters. You can add from a list of many filters and apply them to your video during the conversion. There are 12 categories of filters and many within each one. They include standard filters you may see in an app like Pixelmator except for video. You can add as many as you want, and change the blend mode of each one. Of course, the more you add, the longer it will take. To add a filter, simply click on the [+] button in the Filters panel. Once you have added one, you will see the properties for the filter below the button. You can either delete a filter by clicking the [-] button, or you can just turn it off if you want to keep it, but want to preview your video without it. Stomp’s filters allow you to easily add many filters to your video without professional software.

One very nice (but not necessary) feature added to Stomp is performance control. In the Performance tab of Stomp>Preferences…, you can specify how many concurrent tasks to run, and whether to give other apps priority. This is great if you want to play Call of Duty 4 while converting your episodes of Lost (legally downloaded of course).

shinywhitebox‘s Stomp retails for $29.95 and you can download a free trial from their site. It makes it very easy to convert videos and add filters, but the only thing it has over an app like Handbrake is it’s Filters. If you do not need filters, then I suggest you go with Handbrake, because it’s free and works just fine. But, Stomp does provide a nice interface and a few advanced features that you will not find in Handbrake.

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