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Compressor 3 vs. 4
Hi my name is Gabriel, I have a quick question. Through out the last year on various machines (that get moved around quite often) there tends to be the growing theme that compressor 3 seems to be faster than 4, when FCP is not open.
I’d like to know if anyone knows for sure, at the current moment I don’t have any 2 Mac Pro’s that have the exact same specifications and different version of Final Cut Studio.
What I do have to offer, is what we do with Compressor we only use these formats;
DVC PRO HD
XDCAM
Apple Pro Res 422
H.264 (Minor amount, for streaming)Pending if anyone knows with certainty, it will help us decide and define a render cluster.
Thank you,
Gabriel -
2 Replies
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For the best performance don’t have two open at the same time. Keep compressor running by itself. I’ve not seen much of a speed improvement with Compressor 4.
Brad Wright is software engineer, so often hard to figure out what he is talking about. He is always happy to explain answers further.
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There’s some significant reasons why there’s current limits to speed improvement.
The codecs themselves have to take advantage of multithread.
Quicktime is still 32bit.
IF you look at Activity Monitor you’ll see some thing related to Compressor 4 have been brought to 64bit. CompressorJobController for example.
I have seem some speed improvements but it’s only under certain codecs and circumstances so, overall, it’s not significant.https://www.macworld.com/article/161002/2011/07/compressor4.html
Compressor 4 offers accelerated 64-bit processing of codecs like ProRes and H.264
. . . simply making Compressor a 64-bit application would not solve the problem of codecs that are optimized for 32-bit, or which are not multi-threaded. In fact, multi-threading and network rendering can save more time than just having Compressor at 64-bit. In not making Compressor 64-bit, Apple preserves the program’s compatibility with a wide range of current third-party 32-bit QuickTime codecs, thus making the transition to FCP X easier for some current users.https://garrettgibbons.com/blog/compressor-4-0-practical-test
While he says he was “shocked” by the speeds, his examples note small speed increases.
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