Basic compressor questions

[Cody Walters]

Are you exporting out of FCP a self-contained video then going to compressor? With an iMac of those specs it will take a while to export and compress.

Cody Walters
JW Studio LLC
Houston Video Production
Houston Wedding Videographer

Final Cut Studio 3
Adobe CS5 Master Suite
Panasonic HVX-200
Canon 7D

[Andrew Rendell]

It might be worth checking through the settings, e.g., the Resize filter – if it’s set to Best it will take a lot longer than Fast or Better, also if you’re creating a progressive file and the Deinterlace is set to Best, it will take much longer than Fast or Better. And Multi-pass will take longer than single pass.

When I do exports for viewing or posting on the web I usually reckon that the Better settings + Multi-pass are fine and the Best settings aren’t really worthwhile, but do some tests on a clip that’s a few seconds long to see what works for the material your using.

[Chris Tompkins]

Yes.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Kylee Pena]

I’ve found that when I go from a ProRes to another format like h264 with resizing or frame rate changes, I’ve been able to speed up the process a lot with job chaining. Basically, I set up the file to convert to another ProRes file first, with all the resizing and framerate changes done – no compression happening here, just a change in frame size. Then that file gets sent to the h264 preset where the heavy crunching happens. You don’t HAVE to do this with job chaining but it makes it nice and automated if you can set up a Compressor batch as a chain, drop in your ProRes, and let it go. This of course produces a duplicate ProRes file of another frame size that you’ll have to remember to delete – I just have it go to a folder I call TEMP so I know it’s all junk. Job chaining can be handy sometimes and for a while I didn’t know about it, so it’s good to know anyway.

This has worked really great for me because I commonly produce ProRes masters and have to create reduced framerate and various frame sizes and bit rates for the web versions. I haven’t noticed any quality issues or anything, but I should warn you that while I do this almost daily, I am not an encoding mega-expert when it comes to the science of it. Basically, the big slow down in Compressor seemed to be changing frame size or rate while also changing from ProRes to H.264. Once it didn’t have the compressing to do at the same time, it was much more efficient. I think the last 6 minute video I did took less than 15 minutes.

I wrote a blog about this, though I need to revise it to be clearer, maybe it’ll help a bit. Your mileage may vary, as always.

https://kyleesportfolio.com/blog/?p=160