Can’t Compression do faster than this… ?

[Chris Babbitt]

What are you using to compress? Compressor? Quicktime? Are you doing mpg1, 2, or 4? What settings are you using?

[David Roth weiss]

If you are compressing from the timeline it can take a very long time to encode to MPEG. Have you tried exporting a QT first, and then encoding???

[Michael Alberts]

If you are using Compressor and compressing to MPEG2 you should try using the CBR setting for faster encodes. Next time give us a little more detailed info. We working blind here trying to help you.

Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.

[Jaap Verdenius]

I am using Compressor 2.0.1, going from DV to MPEG-2 using the DVD 90 min. high quality 4:3 preset from the Compressor menu

[Chris Babbitt]

Instead of High Quality, use 1-pass VBR. 2-pass VBR is broken in Compressor 2. APPLE, ARE YOU LISTENING?

[Jaap Verdenius]

Sorry about that, Michael. CBR=constant bitrate? It made a difference. I did a test with a 3 min. sequence with three settings. The results:
Best Quality 90 min. preset – 8 minutes
Fastest Encode 90 minutes – about 1’50”
Best Quality 90 min. with Constant bitrate instead of 2passVBRbest – about 2’10”

David, I did the same test with the same sequence exported as QT reference movie. They were perhaps 10 seconds quicker in all three versions; let’s say about equal to the time it took to create the reference movie.

OK, I think I’m beginning to understand this… thanks a lot guys for asking me questions!

Jaap

[Jerry Witt]

Yeah, I keep hearing people insisting that exporting a movie and THEN compressing is remarkably faster. This has not been my experience at all. The REAL bottleneck (as already pointed out) is Apple’s VBR compression. It is slow and has serious quality issues (especially in transitions). I’m surprised Apple hasn’t addressed this yet.

[Sophie876]

I just wanted to add my support for the idea that Apple really needs to address the quality issue with Compressor’s handling of transitions. It’s … well…. awful. Dissolves especially.

I’ve never tried a one-pass VBR compression though… I think I’ll give that a shot with my next project.

I usually use two-pass VBR and lots of hoping and wishing.

[Chris Catalano]

Also just to add a little more info: We know how awful the quality of VBR is in Compressor 2, but what alot of people don’t mention is how much the file sizes are screwed up. For example I just installed the Final Cut Studio suite on a new Powerbook G4. Brand new system, everything’s up to date. I captured a 45 minute VHS tape (through a Sony firewire DV converter) and went about encoding it. I didn’t bother with any export of reference movies or self contained movies. I went straight to the captured video file and compressed it. I selected the 120 minute Best Quality setting. The description of that setting says it is set for an average bitrate of 5mbps, which supports 120 minutes of video on a DVD-5 using .192 Dolby audio. That’s just fine for what I wanted. (I’ll be putting 2 such vhs tapes onto 1 dvd). So that’s what I used. The destination of the encode was set up for an external firewire drive which supposedly should help with the speed a little bit. So the end result is that it took over 7 1/2 hours to encode the 45 minute clip. All along the way the “Time Remaining” field in Batch Monitor was sooooo far off. For instance at a point where it said there was only 1 hour left, there was really about 3 hours left. How lame is that? But the real problem is the finished file size for the 45 minute clip was a little over 2GB!!! I pulled it into DVDSP to see what the average bitrate was – and it turned out to be 6.3!! How the heck could this have been so far off from the targeted rate of the encoding setting? Absolutely ridiculous! So that was a complete waste of 7 1/2 hours of my life.

The bottom line is that Compressor 2 is crap. And Apple doesn’t care. There have been numerous threads over on there discussion boards regarding these issues and there’s never been a response from Apple. People who have called in to tech support are always told that they’re the first ones to ever report such problems. In my opinion Apple is more interested in iPods and iTunes downloads. I believe you’ll start to see less and less ‘milestone’ achievements in the supposedly pro applications. IPod and iLife sales probably bring in exponentially more revenue than sales of the pro apps, so us poor saps trying to make a living will usually pay the price. (Just my opinion, of course).

In any event, I need to go load up Bitvice onto the Powerbook so I can get some work done.

Cheers,
Chris