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Compressor Frame Controls settings question (and panic!)
Sorry to barge in here folks with my first post, but I would really appreciate your help as I’m in a bit of a deadline panic!
I’m using Compressor 3.0.5, on an 8-core ‘early 2008’ Mac Pro with 14GB RAM.
Compressor is estimating over 30 hours to encode an 11 minute 1080i ProRes (self-contained from FCP) to 720p H.264. And ETA keeps increasing as time goes on!
I know I probably shouldn’t put all the settings at their highest level in Frame Control, but I did notice perfect quality on a short test, particularly on end credits which looked immaculate at 2000kbits/s (but didn’t with the default Frame Control settings).
Normally, through trial-and-error, I would find out which of those settings is perhaps not necessary to get equally good results … but I’ve found myself very short of time at this late stage (I’m not perfect).
Can any of these setting be altered without losing noticeable picture quality, and speed up the ETA by a significant amount?
i.e.
resize filter: Best
Output filds: Progressive
Deinterlace: Best
Adaptive details ticked.
Anti-alias: (slider on default, i.e to left)
Details level: (slider on default, i.e to left)
Rate conversion: Fast (Nearest frame)
Set Duration to: (default, i.e. greyed out)
‘so source frames play at 25 fps’ selectedHELP! (pretty please)
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6 Replies
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Change Best to Better. If you really aren’t happy with Better than you’re going to have to live with very long encode times. Of course you should be using QMaster to set up a virtual cluster of 8 instances.
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QMaster is on, and according to iStats has been using all 8 cores, at full wack, for over eight hours. ETA is now predicted as 29 hours …
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Just to update …
In the end I gave up on the encode as it was taking too long. Also when I opened Batch Processor, I could see that it was still trying to encode the 11 minute edit, even though I had paused and deleted it from Compressor.
I then decided to stick with ‘better’ settings rather than ‘best’ in Frame Controls panel, and the encode finished within an hour.
Thanks for your advice.
Now I have a new problem! (see new thread)
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How many instances did you set it to and did you specifically select the virtual cluster when you submitted the encode?
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It’s rare that “best” settings show useful improvements relative to the time they take.
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I did select the virtual cluster. In terms of instances .. that’s an interesting question.
For a while now my Qmaster settings have been set at 6 instances. I chose 6 because I have an ‘8-core’ Mac Pro, so thought it probably best to leave 2 free to run other apps.
However, according to the iStats graphic monitoring of core activity, it looks like all 8 cores are being fully used by Qmaster. This seems consistent with the fact that FCP runs quite sluggish while Compressor/Qmaster is doing it’s encoding.
Am I correct to equate cores with instances? If so, why are 8 being used when 6 have been selected?
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