-
Compressor Frame Controls settings question (and panic!)
Sorry to cross-post this 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! (it started as ETA of 8 hours)
I know I probably shouldn’t put all the settings at their highest level in Frame Controls, 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! (it’s been a long day and tomorrow is delivery day!)
-
14 Replies
-
Going From better to Best on your de-interlace is adding a significant amount of time to your render, and probably not adding an equal amount of value. Id turn that one down a notch.
-Andy George
Senior Editor
http://www.chiselindustries.com -
-
OK I’ve switched from best to better on deinterlacing, and I’m testing this on just a 2 seconds sample, i.e. a self-contained export from Final Cut.
Compressor has been encoding this for 50 minutes, and is predicting completion in over 10 hours! And steadily increasing all the time.
QMaster is running and iStats shows all 8 cores being fully utilised.
Surely this can’t be right? Seems to have got worse?
-
Have a look to the Activity monitor and see if Compressor is really working.
rafael -
UPDATE
I’ve just checked my original test done with the best settings listed in my first post.
It was a 2 minute sample and it took Compressor under 4 hours to complete.
And just to update you on my latest 2 second clip test (with deinterlace downgraded to better from best) .. it is now predicting 16 hours for completion.
?!
-
Thanks Rafael for your suggestion.
Can you please tell me what exactly what I should look at in Activity Monitor?
There are various Compresssor related things listed and not sure which is most relevant and whether I should be looking at CPU or threads or …?
-
Thanks Rafael for the repair programme. I’ll use it next time I have a problem.
In the end I opened Batch Processor and 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.
I think, based on my initial 2 minute clip test, the ‘best’ settings would have taken about 24 hours so don’t have time for that.
Now I have a different problem! (which perhaps I’ll start a new thread with?), i.e. I have intermittent thin grey dashes at the bottom edge of the movie. Very distracting!
Any ideas?
-
[Harry Powell] “In the end I opened Batch Processor and I could see that it was still trying to encode the 11 minute edit, even though I had paused and deleted it from Compressor. “
You may be suffering a bug that I thought was fully fixed.
On starting, Compressor try to finish jobs that has been canceled or haven’t finished for any reason..
The fix: Clean the “History Window” before sending any job.
Try that.
rafael -
Thanks again for the extra tip Rafael. I’ll make sure to do that.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up