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Proxy Making
Hi! Could you please advise me on this? I have 3 TBs of 4K .crm footage on an external drive hooked up to a Mac mini. Media Encoder has been running to make medium res QT proxies of all this for about 15 hours now, and I wonder if it should be taking so long. The previews are showing footage that was from the beginning, as if it was going backwards or redoing previous footage that was already encoded.
How can I know what’s going on? Do I just need to wait or is something wrong? Thank you very much for any advice you can offer!
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5 Replies
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It’s possible that Media Encoder is experiencing some technical issues or bottlenecks that are causing it to take longer than expected or to repeat previously encoded footage. Check the progress of the individual files being encoded.
On a Mac, you can use the Activity Monitor to check if the Media Encoder is using up all of the available resources on your Mac Mini. If the encoder is using up a lot of CPU or RAM, this could explain the slow encoding speed.
Or you can try encoding a smaller batch of files to determine if the issue is with the Media Encoder or the footage.
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Thank you very much, Usama! The encoder has been working non-stop for a couple of days and only about 90 of the 700 clips are done. I looked at the Activity Monitor and saw that about 95% was being used by the ME and all the RAM. Someone said that the quality is probably going to be defective but the log says “successful” for the done clips. What do you think about that?
I had researched and thought that the Mac mini 1 was powerful enough for this work. Do you think it’s sufficient?
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I switched to using an MSI laptop which (unlike the Mac Mini 1) made the proxies sequentially. However, also unlike the Mac Mini 1, the MSI got very heated, which scared me. Like with the Mac Mini, the MSI is taking days (a few minutes for each clip). It stopped by itself last night (no error message, no crash, just stopped encoding) so now I’m trying to see how to resume the proxy making. Any advice from you who have experience with these things would be gtreatly appreciated.
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It’s my pleasure, Robert.
The fact that the logs show “successful” for the completed clips does not necessarily mean that the quality of the output is optimal. The quality of the output depends on a variety of factors, including the settings used during the encoding process, the source material, and the available hardware resources.
As for whether the Mac mini 1 is powerful enough for this work, it depends on the specific details of the encoding process, such as the codec used, the resolution of the source material, and the desired output quality. However, given that the system is running at very high utilization, it is likely that the process would benefit from more powerful hardware.
Regarding the MSI laptop, it is normal for laptops to get hot when running resource-intensive tasks, such as video encoding. However, if the system is overheating and shutting down by itself, it could be a sign of a hardware issue or insufficient cooling. It is recommended to monitor the system temperature and take breaks to allow the system to cool down periodically. Consider using a laptop cooling pad to help dissipate heat and improve airflow.
To resume the proxy-making process on the MSI laptop, you may need to check the logs or error messages to see if there was a specific issue that caused it to stop. Depending on the software being used for encoding, you may be able to resume the process from where it left off, or you need to start over from the beginning.
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Thank you very much, Usama!
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