Adobe Media Encoder Alternative for Mac: When You Just Need Smaller Video

Adobe Media Encoder is the better tool in several honest cases, and you should not pay us for any of them.

You edit in Premiere Pro or After Effects. Sending a sequence straight to the queue and carrying on editing is the reason the product exists. Smol takes finished files only. If your source is a project, not a file, stay where you are.

You need production features. Adobe lists LUTs and loudness corrections applied without reopening projects, proxy creation, and Time Tuner for adjusting clip duration. Smol offers none of these. A delivery house or a post team needs them.

You must hit a specific delivery spec. Adobe says Media Encoder outputs to “almost any format you can imagine”. Smol writes MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV with H.265 or H.264. If a broadcaster or festival asks for something outside that list, use Adobe.

You already pay for Creative Cloud. Check whether your plan includes Media Encoder; if it does, the sensible move is to use it.

It is worth it if you already subscribe to Adobe for editing, and hard to justify if you only want to shrink video.

Adobe’s Media Encoder page describes it as a tool to ingest, transcode and create proxies, with presets, Watch Folders and Destination Publishing for automation. It sends you to a plans page instead of listing a price. The plans page shows Creative Cloud Pro, Creative Cloud Standard and single-app plans, and in our check it showed no Media Encoder single-app plan. Prices vary by region, so look at your own country’s page rather than trusting a number quoted elsewhere.

For a filmmaker that is a fair trade. For someone who needs a 4K screen recording under an upload limit, it is a subscription for a task that several free methods also handle.

Anything tied to editing or finishing. Smol has no editor hand-off, no LUTs, no loudness correction, no proxies and no Time Tuner.

Its video side is deliberately narrow: output MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, codec H.265 (the default) or H.264, a quality label or an exact CRF from 0 to 63 with nine speed presets, resolution kept or reduced, and an option to drop the audio track. That covers shrinking a finished file. It does not cover mastering. If you are unsure which codec to pick, H.265 vs H.264 explains what changes.

Both tools have a watched-folder idea. Smol’s has a known defect: it can make already-optimized files larger, so point it only at folders of fresh, unoptimized files such as screen recordings or camera exports. The details are in our watched folder guide.

Export your master from your editor as you do now, then drag the file into Smol instead of queueing a second encode in Media Encoder.

1. Install Smol and drop the finished video, or a whole folder, into the window.
2. Pick MP4 with H.265 for the smallest result, or H.264 if the recipient’s player is old.
3. Choose a quality label ("High" is the default, "Web" goes smaller) or set a CRF yourself.
4. Reduce resolution if the destination does not need the full frame.
5. Save the settings as a preset. Presets live on that Mac, so recreate them on each machine.

Smol writes a copy with a _compressed suffix beside the original by default, so nothing is overwritten. For many files at once, see batch compressing videos on a Mac. If your work is delivery for clients, Smol for video production delivery covers where it fits and where it does not.

It depends on what you are replacing. For a free converter with a large settings surface, HandBrake and its alternatives are the usual answer. For a mixed folder of video, audio, images and PDFs on a one-time price, Smol is the one we build. For editor hand-off with a queue, nothing here replaces Media Encoder, and we would not pretend otherwise.

Smol is $29 once for one Mac. There is no trial, so decide from the format list above. All sales are final.