Compressor 4.0.3 Takes long time

[Michael Mcintyre]

Hey Eric –

That does sound like a long time! Curious if you’re submitting the job to your cluster of cores. You noted that you’ve got a 6-core so let them do the heavy lifting. Used to be done through QMaster but I believe it’s now part of Lion. – Michael McIntyre

[Eric Holzapfel]

Hello Michael,
Thanks for reply – still have a big problem with compressor.
the job is submitted to “This Computer”, not sure how that relates to
using the “cores”, which I would think would be automatic.

One point, I have the old version of Compressor (ver. 3), and the job completes in
10 minutes!!! So there definitely is some sort of issue with Compressor 4.0.3 on my
system.

I will contact apple next. If there is a special way to submit a compressor job
such that it uses all the processors I would be interested to know that one!

Thanks,
Eric

Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop

[Eric Holzapfel]

Perhaps someone else will see this.

I did a test using Compressor 3.x (the FCS 3 version) and the QT video compressed for
youtube in 10 minutes! The same file took (no lie) 2 hours in version 4.

Thanks All,

eholz1

Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop

[Jeff Greenberg]

I see you’re exporting a ProRes QuickTime to compressor.
Have you tried the “Share” send to compressor as a comparison (actually, I expect that to be even slower, but haven’t tested it.)

Out of curiosity, could you also run activity monitor to see how many of the processors are ‘working’ during the conversion?

[Eric Holzapfel]

Hello Jeff,

Thanks for the input. I ended up contacting Apple on this one.
The main reason being that it worked (using same settings) on Compressor 3.

Apple ended up having me try using a straight Youtube template from Compressor 4.
This took about 10 or 11 minutes, and compressed my ProRes 422 QT file (4 GB) down
to around 700 MB. Apple seemed to think this was “normal”. Compressor 3 took about the
same length of time, but did about 300 mb.

I compared the settings of the stock YouTube template in Compressor 4 to my droplet settings.
I did have frame controls enabled, but with minor changes. I also set the file for fast streaming.

I revised my droplet settings, taking the frame controls out of the equation. This resulted in
a processing time of about 10 to 11 minutes and a file size of 340 MB. All this is interesting I suppose, but (BUT) the same droplet compressed similar files in the 10 minute or less (depending on length of video) in Compressor 4 before I took the system in to Apple for repair.

I was using FCP 7 for some of these file, not FCP X – perhaps there is a difference there.

I did get the file up to youtube – so at least things are working.

Thanks Again,

Eric

Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop

[Jeff Greenberg]

Eric,

That’d make perfect sense.

The youtube setting in 3.5 is set to 10mb/s
The youtube setting in 4.0 is set to 20mb/s

Meaning the youtube setting in version 4 should be 2x the size.

Remember that youtube will recompress everything you send it – so the bigger size (on your end) means it’s less compressed…and means a better quality from youtube.