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Compressor GUI slowness
I’m getting a weird problem with every computer I have here. I’ve been just working with it, but I’d love to get to the bottom of it.
First off, there isn’t a problem wit compressor rendering speed. Once a batch is submitted, everything runs pretty well.
The problem that any time I do something to the batch window (the window you drop files into) it is really really slow. For example, if I drop 10 files in the window, they come in pretty fast, just a few seconds. But if I try to click a single file in the batch window, now it spins for 1-2 mins. before anything happens. If I try to select another file in the batch window, same thing.
If I try to drag a setting onto a a group of files, it takes a REALLY long time. It gets the beachball, and if you right click on the application in the dock, it says the application is not responding. But, if you wait 30-40 minuets (the more clips that are in the batch, the longer it takes) it finally unlocks, and I can submit my batch.
What’s weird is that this same behavior is happening on 5 computers here. It’s happening on a computer that I just clean whipped, gave a fresh install of snow leopard, and a fresh install of FCP (including compressor).
I can’t think of anything EVERY computer has in common that could effect something like this. Most have an aja card, but not all. Most have CS3 and CS5 installed, but not all. Actually, all might have CS3 installed.
Any ideas? Is this just normal? I don’t remember it behaving like this a year ago, but it seem to be happening to all of the computers here.
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8 Replies
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Is this while a batch is going? If so, and you have a virtual cluster setup, it’s because your CPUs are likely maxed out. Opening the Activity Window utility can help to identify/sort out problems like this.
Jeremy
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Sadly no, even if there isn’t anything else running it still behaves slowly. I’ll check out to see what Compressor is doing in activity monitor and get back with results.
All computers are Mac Pros, either 4 or 8 core. (mostly 8 core)
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What are the source files and what steps have you taken to get them to Compressor?
Basically, give me a run down of your workflow.
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FYI – if this is your situation, maybe the info helps:
With any machine in Compressor if I am batching with h264/mp4 source files from HDSLRs I get SLOW functionality and spinning beachballs. Seems like the processor is a bit overwhelmed with batches of those.
The best way to convert your (for example) Canon 7D HDSLR native clips to an editable format, is to load the correct plug-in to FCS and Log and Transfer from the card (or card folder) as ProRes.
After that you’ve got intraframe clips and if you want to further batch transcode them, Compressor behavior is happy and normal. This has been true on my Mac Pro and my MBPRO as well.
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I seemed to have fixed my problem by trashing Compressor settings. I have yet to try on more than one computer, but it totally fixed my slow GUI problems on my main computer.
Now when I drop a preset onto a bunch of files, it only thinks for 20-30 seconds before I can hit submit. Hope this can helps others, if I have so many computers with the problem, it must be somewhat wide spread. Or maybe everyone else knows to trash their compressor settings every once in a while and don’t run into the problem?
I threw away the files as shown in this article.
https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1888
I’m going to make sure this works with my other computers as well, I’ll get back to this if it doesn’t fix one of them.
Thanks for the help everyone!
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I’m having terrible slowness with the Compressor GUI. The window doesn’t update for minutes no matter what I try. I followed the directions in the link to trash the prefs, trash the Q-something queue, repaired my disk permissions and restarted…same impossibly slow GUI.
Did you ever find a fix?
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Hey, William Car has the actual solution to my problem that I originally posted about. I found that trashing compressor prefs. helped, but that was because i was compressing other types of footage. I found that compressor only slowed down when I was converting H264 flies later on, but by then forgot about this tread so I didn’t come back to update. (Then I got an e-mail today with a responce.)
Converting HD files from a Cannon 5D to SD center cut is part of my daily workflow now, and it still slows compressor GUI down on every mac I’ve ever worked on. Log and Transferring the files would work, but I don’t like the doing the extra step if I can avoid it. So what I find is that I simply budget in the time that Compressor spins. I’ve found that if I’m doing 100 clips, it will spin and look like it’s crashing for about 1.5 hours, and a 8 core mac pro machine. I haven’t been able to come up with a real hard and fast rule for how much time it will spin for, but I just expect the spinning to happen and deal with it accordingly. It takes less time than log and transferring all the files would, and then I don’t have annoying intermediary files to keep track of or store. I think there are other programs out there to deal with 5D stuff, and I really should look into them, but I really like how compressor, once a batch is submitted, can use the multicore function to rip though the files.
Not sure what types of file you are converting, but if it’s H264 files this is probably what’s going on.
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I find that batches of more than 30-40 clips make Compressor grind to a halt.
Keeping more, but smaller batches seem to work better in my opinion. You can of course submit multiple batches.
Jeremy
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