Compressor Presets Do a Terrible Job of Resizing

I just wanted to share my findings with everyone else, in hopes that Apple corrects a serious issue with the current Compressor 3 H264 presets. It appears that Compressor is using the fastest, poorest scaling possible. What I have linked below is a still I pulled from a DVCPRO HD 1080p video that I converted to Apple TV format. The first was done with Apple's default settings:
http://homepage.mac.com/cbauer/files/scalingtest_defaults.png
Note the jaggy edges around "compressor scaling", and the edges of the circles below. For this second image, I turned on "frame controls" and changed the resize filter to "best":
http://homepage.mac.com/cbauer/files/scalingtest_modified.png
Note how much cleaner the edges of the text are. For best comparison, download both images and open them up together in Preview so you can jump between the two.
As far as I can tell, this issue is apparent with any Compressor preset using the H264 codec; even presets you create yourself. I have adjusted all of my own presets so that the best resize filter is enabled in Frame Controls. It seems that if you export from QuickTime Player or Final Cut via QuickTime Export, you get clean resizing, so the issue is just within Compressor itself.
Thanks for reading.

Jeff A. Harrell wrote:
This one is gonna get filed as "works as intended," I'm sure.
That's correct - so Jeff, are you ever wrong? - the only time Frame Controls default to On is when you're doing an HD-to-SD DVD downconversion. Even then, Resize is set to Better (though that's typically good enough for most scenarios) and everything else (Deinterlace, Retime) are set to the Fastest settings.
From a workflow standpoint, I'd argue that it's not advisable to turn on Frame Controls with most h.264 encodes, especially the multi-pass ones, because you're adding (supremely time-intensive) Frame Controls processing to every pass. For stuff like iPod conversions, there's no benefit to running Frame Controls for the 6+ passes that are performed. (Though yes, I know the AppleTV preset only allows a single-pass.)
Instead, I'd suggest transcoding down to your desired size via a ProRes encode (or whatever codec you think is a good intermediate step) with Frame Controls on, then Job Chain that to your h.264 encode.

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