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compressor gives my mac narcolepsy
I have a dual 2GHz G5, running FCP 5.1.4 and Compressor 2.1. About 3 months ago my computer developed narcolepsy whenever I compress any video, whether directly exporting from FCP or dragging a self contained movie into the Compressor window. In the middle of processing, my computer will go into sleep mode. I have to shake the mouse, it’ll go to sleep again right away, I shake the mouse again and it’s good for 15 minutes or so. It will compress the video eventually, the sleep mode doesn’t seem to affect the final result. (Until today when Compressor just seemed to stop compressing when it was almost done- very frustrating)
It doesn’t matter if I open and use other programs while Compressor is running, it will go to sleep in the middle of my typing an email. This only happens when Compressor is running. BTW, preferences are set and locked at “never go to sleep”.
I’ve uninstalled Motion (and not reinstalled) and also have uninstalled and reinstalled Compressor several times. I didn’t reinstall Qmaster the last time I reinstalled Compressor. I turned off Airport when compressing, when I noticed that I couldn’t trash some parts of Qmaster and AECore even though nothing was running. I saw on another forum that there might be a connection between wireless cards and Compressor crashing. These things seem to have helped a little bit.
Compressor doesn’t crash. The computer just goes to sleep. Any leads, suggestions, etc are appreciated. I’d like to get a good night’s sleep instead of babysitting the computer.
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8 Replies
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Sounds like you’re trying to be “green” and that you have your energy saver settings on. Go into the System Preferences, do not pass go or collects $200, and set everything there to “never” and turn off the switch that let’s drives sleep as well.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Thanks David. I wish it was that but I have the preferences set for “never go to sleep”. I’ve changed that and reset it, locked it, etc.
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[mari kittredge] “I have the preferences set for “never go to sleep”.”
Sorry, but all that talk of narcolepsy made me go in that direction.
I seldom recommend it, but it might be time for a reinstall from the ground up.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Is your computer going to sleep or is just your monitor going to sleep? What kind of monitor do you have? What video card do you have? Do you have any 3rd party RAM installed? Do you have any third party cards installed? When was the last time you dusted out the inside of your computer?
I ask because I’ve seen computers do strange things due to hardware either going bad or from excessive heat (which might only happen when your CPUs are really chugging away transcoding a file).
Going off of David’s suggestion though, if you have a spare driving floating around you could do a complete OS + Apps install on that drive, boot from it and see if Compressor still causes a problem. If not, then it problem solved, but if the computer still has a sleep issue then it’s most likely a hardware problem.
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Mari,
I have the same setup as you and experienced the same problem. I could not figure it out to save my life. I checked the system logs and found out that the processors were starting to overheat so the system shut it self down as a safety precaution. This would only happen when I ran compressor which is processor intensive. I place a room fan directly in front of the computer when I run compressor and have not had the computer shut down during an encode since. Give it a try and good luck!
Bill Carnicelli
Carnicelli Media Productions, Inc. -
Thanks Bill for letting me know I’m not the only one with this issue. I’ll definitely try the fan! I do have istat on the dashboard of my computer and I (and my mac repair person) have been checking the temperatures but haven’t seen them go high.
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Well, I’ve successfully exported a few movies with a room fan blowing on the computer! I guess it was overheating despite what the numbers were showing. A while back, my mac developed an issue where the fans run all the time and I’ve been working on it with a mac repair shop but so far no solution. Thanks for your help.
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Mari,
Glad to hear that it is working for you. It’s such a frustrating problem. I don’t think the water cooled dual 2.5 G5s was one of Apple’s better designs.
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