FCP to Compressor

[Sascha Engel]

MM, I’d first dumb all the Preference files connected to FCP & Compressor.
Then re-render or encode new your Final Footage and try to compress that new encoding.
It’s still there?

Sascha

[Ron Pestes]

I ran compressor repair which dumps all the prefs. Exported the sequence and re encoded but no luck. Repaired permissions too but no dice. The program starts just fine but then part way through it starts getting that pulsing blocky problem about once per second still. Just one frame at a time then it is good for about another second. I did get one good sequence this morning but the rest have been bad since. I have tried about 7 or 8 times. Not sure why the first one was good as I had not made any changes. Should I reinstall compressor or do you have any other ideas?

Apple Certified Master Pro FCS 2
Sony EX-3
MacBook Pro

[Sascha Engel]

That is a weird thing. Never encountered a problem like this before. If it’s not compressor, it only can be the source files. That’s why I thought to give it a shot, and re-render one of the final clips and encode those with compressor to see if there’s a change.

Sascha

[David Eaks]

I think Sascha’s idea of re-rendering is a good one. Delete the render files for one of the clips and try again.

[Ad Van diem]

Hi Ron,

I ran into exactly the same problem last night (that’s how I found this thread). My material is HD (EX3 1920×1080) and edited natively in FCP, using an XDCAM EX 1080i50 timeline. I need to compress this to dvd (SD MPEG2). I’ve sent my project to Compressor from FCP, and used Apples standard “DVD: Best Quality 90 minutes” setting. The result is exactly as you describe: a sequence pulsating with a blocky frame each ± 1 sec. Unusable. The problem isn’t there in the first minutes of the output, it starts after around 5 mins into the program, gets worse and then disappears again.

I haven’t found the root cause of this problem yet.
Maybe you can help. A few questions:
– are you using any filters or scaling in the sequences in FCP? (some of the clips in my sequence are scaled to 105%)
– are you using any transcoding in between timelines in FCP? (eg EX material on ProRes timeline)
– are you using any HD/SD up/downscaling between FCP and Compressor? (I do: HD > SD)

Has anyone else run into this problem before? Any help from this forum is appreciated!

[Ron Pestes]

The answers to all your questions is NO. No filters, no scaling native timeline using EX 720/30 frame setting. Can’t figure this out. The next day it did three sequences perfect then started up again. I exported the timelines and also even changed the compressor preset. That helped but the problem was still there very slightly. I have never had this problem before and have been using these same settings for over two years. Could static electricity do this?

Apple Certified Master Pro FCS 2
Sony EX-3
MacBook Pro

[Sascha Engel]

This sounds so weird, never heard of it before.
Maybe you should check if your house is build on an old indian graveyard and you have a Poltergeist in the house ;-)! Then Up for sale would be your next step.
I feel you – I hate this kind of problems – they make you helpless cause you do not find the solution – it’s like fighting a ghost.
If you find a workaround let me know – i am interested in it.

Sascha

[David Eaks]

Out of curiosity, are you guys that have the problem running both Motion 4 & 5 on this boot drive/partition?

[Anthony Dias]

Any updates on this issue???

I’m having the same type of problem. Definitely a BUG…. copying and pasting this info to Apple’s Feedback page and I hope their engineers are paying attention. 🙂

Pulsing blockiness about every 15 frames on MPEG2 encoding for SD DVD using Compressor. (2-pass VBR 6.0mb/s avg – 7.5 mb/s max)

The problem is occurring around the 28 minute mark from a source that is a self contained SD ProRes 720×480 (16:9) QuickTime file.

The particular section contains outdoor video that was originally shot on a PMW EX1 and a Canon EOS 5D MKII at 1080 30P.

The footage is of some kids jumping around in a park… lots of grass and lots of detail and noise.

—

I thought I fixed this issue by using compression markers. But I had do to other mistakes, I had to re-encode the whole video yet again.

On this second-to-last re-encode, I forgot to put the compression markers and sure enough I got the blocks. But after adding compression markers to the updated ProRes file, the blockiness remained!

Now, I’m trying again, this time with the “submit to” going to my computer’s “local Cluster” instead of to the computer itself… I will get back on if this changes anything.

I’m running FCS 2 on Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and Compressor 3.5.3.

also, @ David Eaks, I am not running Motion at all (and I don’t have the new FCPX stuff anyway).

[Anthony Dias]

UPDATE:

I just re-submitted to the “cluster” instead of to “this computer” the SAME EXACT compressor item with no changes to the compression markers whatsoever.

AND NOW THE BLOCKINESS IS GONE!!!

The funny thing is that the cluster is just my 8-Core Mac Pro by itself! No other computers. Why would submitting to the “cluster” produce different results than submitting to the computer?

The file sizes are different as well (with the same settings). The one with the blocks is 2.75 GB and the one without the blocks is 2.81 GB.

My guess is that in cluster mode, Compressor has to cut the file up into smaller pieces and thus avoids whatever break-down point is happening at whatever time frame.

I’m interested in knowing if anybody else experiences this “fix” when submitting to the computer’s cluster instead of “this computer”.

By the way, If you don’t have the cluster as an option, you have to enable it in the System Preferences under Apple Qmaster… double click on the “Compressor” option and input the number of instances you want… in my case, I am using 7. I’m using 7 rather than 8 (the max on my machine) because 8 seemed to hog up too much of the computer and I couldn’t even surf the web.

BTW I completely re-installed FCS yesterday after accidentally removing it using FCS remover (I was only trying to remove Compressor and Qmaster!)

Removing FCS and re-installing it did not fix the problem, submitting to a cluster did.

good luck.