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Days wasted as Finacl Cut’s Compressor ‘times out’ near end of job
Hello – compression is a bit of a dark art to me, so any help is appreciated.
I have just under an hours worth of footage – shot on a Canon XHA1 in HD1080i, 25fps, 1440×1080.
I’m using a Mac Book Pro 2.4Ghz with 2GB RAM.
When I use Compressor (3.05) with DVD best quality 90 minutes and MPEG-2 6.2MBS 2-pass it takes about 8-10 hours to almost complete the job, then seems to stop doing anything at all.
I have the settings as SD, PAL, 25fps.
I’ve tried compressing straight from Final Cut and converting to Quick Time from FC first.
Does anybody know where I’m going wrong? I was hoping to have it finished last week.
Thanks in advance,
Tom
http://www.tomsimone.co.uk
http://www.tomsimoneweddings.co.uk -
3 Replies
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It’s finally worked, although I’m afraid I’m not really sure why, so not much help to anyone else having the same problem.
Here’s some of the things I did:
1. Moved all my Final Cut files to my main hard drive (they were on an external one), which I figured should speed things up.
2. Exported a QT movie
3. Dragged the QT movie into my timeline and exported using QT conversion. (QT conversion wouldn’t work for me straight from timeline).
4. Used compressor the settings in the post above.
http://www.tomsimone.co.uk
http://www.tomsimoneweddings.co.uk -
Better check the format of your external hard drive Tom. It sound as if it’s formatted FAT32, not Mac Extended, and so you were hitting the 4gb file size limit.
And, in the future, you’re much better off always exporting a self contained QT movie and using that as your master to make DVDs and Web videos with Compressor rather than doing the same from your timeline. It’s not only faster that way, but it frees up FCP for additional editing while Compressor is compressing.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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I’ll just add that, since you have under an hour’s worth of footage, it isn’t necessary to use 2-pass variable (Best Quality) encoding. Just choose single-pass encoding and choose a bit-rate of 7.5. You’ll save a lot of time and have a result that looks at least as good. Be sure to choose Dolby audio as well.
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