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8core Compressor is choking on Mpeg2!
For processing some h.264 last week Compressor *blazed* through footage. Set it up for 4 instances on a self-contained cluster. 8 core with 8GB RAM.
Have about 3.5 hours of DVCPRO-HD 720p, split into about 7 QT reference movies to burn to a viewing DVD. Dropped them in Compressor last night and 14 hours later there are still 2 movies left to compress! Activity monitor shows at least 600% cpu time for compressor.
this can’t be right. My Dual G5 2.3 could get through a 2 hour 1080p film down to SD mpeg-2 in about 6 hours. any ideas or known issues?
10.4.10
Compressor 3.0.1
Mpeg-2 Fastest encode, 120 min -
5 Replies
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That’s probably not too far off at all. Keep in mind that compressing mpeg2 is very very processor intensive. For 3 1/2 hours, it should take a long time, even with 8 cores.
I have a buddy who made a low budget feature film (about 87 minutes) and to compress for DVD still took about 10 hours on my Quad 3.0 system with 8 gig of RAM.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey -
Charlie, are you also a King Cut of sorts?
Do you have the whole Qmaster thing setup? It took me all day to figure this out yesterday, but I finally got it. Not the speed improvement I was hoping, but waaaaay better than before.
Also, I have read that Compressor chokes on it’s own presets when using the virtual clusters and making your own preset is crucial.
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Yeah, I saw your post on Apple.
So here’s the problem. There seems to be a specific bug with DVCPROHD/ProRes and Mpeg-2 transcoding on the Intel macs with Compressor.
One file which was 42 minutes DVCPRO-HD 720, took nearly 2 hours with Compressor (with the whole cluster thing properly set up). But then I took the same file straight into DVD Studio Pro and it was able to encode it in…. 25 freaking minutes.
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Are you compressing a self contained quicktime movie or sending the movie through Final Cut? If you send it through Final Cut it will take forever as it compresses one frame at a time. Also if you use a quicktime reference instead of a self contained it could take a while too, it has to reference all of the clips and render files and put them together while compressing. Of course if you’re doing a feature making the self contained quicktime movie will take forever in the first place. The last thing to check is the setting you are using, I’ve compressed a few 1080P features to DVD 90-min Best Quality (from an uncontained quicktime) and had it take 16 hours on our 8core with 4 instances. It’s because it’s a two pass process so you’re essentially compressing the movie twice. It looks great though.
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That’s too long. On my Dual G5/2.5, I could export a 92 minute 1080p uncompressed sequence to 1pass Mpeg-2 in about 6 hours. So that would take 12 for 2 pass…
I think there’s a very significant bug with the Intel chips and Compressor.
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