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Interesting Compressor conundrum
So there I was, merrily compressing an HD sequence (outputting SD MPG files for DVDSP) for a client approval disk. Yeah, I know I shoulda just taken the QT into DVDSP and let it encode – it was a quick & dirty copy for approval after all. But I digress.
Being a little too sure of myself, I thought I’d be clever and set up a virtual cluster. All done, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch activity monitor scream in to action as the Mac takes off. Anyway, it rips through the encode impressively quickly, until something strange happened. Watching the different sections render in Batch Monitor, when it got to the last section, all of a sudden the processors wound down to virtually zero – and the last 4 minute section of the 24 minute piece then slowed to a crawl. Now I’d wondered why the estimated time had said 2 hours, and puzzled even more as 4/5 of the programme had sped through in 15 minutes, but now it made sense. Processor activity hovered around 2% (it had been at 85% a few minutes earlier) and the render barely progressed. Pausing the process then restarting it (in the hope of kickstarting something to life) had the even more infuriating result of it simply disappearing from the batch list as if it had never been there – and no, I didn’t press terminate by mistake. With the director on my shoulder and the client looking round the door, I had to try hard not to have a Basil Fawlty moment and beat the Mac with a large birch branch.
Using the QT in DVDSP straight resulted in a 10-minute encode and an end result that looked fine. Ahh well.
So, was this operator error? A bug? Something else? It was a dual 3ghz Intel mac with Leopard (latest) FCS2 (so 6.03, compressor 3) and the latest QT. I’d like to get to the bottom of it for my own interest if nothing else…
Jason
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Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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6 Replies
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WEre you exporting directly from your Final Cut sequence using Compressor or did you bring a QT movie into Compressor outside of FCP? I’ve had no luck using virtual cluster in the former, but it’s OK in the latter case. Does Final Cut allow distributed processing via QMaster like Compressor does? I’ve never seen it documented.
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Tom,
It was in Compressor with a self-contained QT, not from FCP. Good thought though.
Anyone else experienced this??
Jason
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Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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Yes. I have seen this but it is ussally the result of a bad export. Also, deleting the history from your Compressor seems to clear up some of these types of problems. Try rexporting and it doens’t have to be self contained, it can be a ref movie.
Jeremy
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[Jason Porthouse] “Being a little too sure of myself, I thought I’d be clever and set up a virtual cluster.”
Exactly how did you do this part? Some of the data got lost during the render.
Cheers
Alexander -
[Alexander Kallas] “Exactly how did you do this part? Some of the data got lost during the render.”
I followd instructions I found here on the COW. Prefs>Qmaster, set instances to 2 (I think it is 4 for the octocore machines), named the cluster and started sharing. Then when submitting a render to Compressor you choose the cluster rather than the local machine.
I don’t think data got lost; it was still compresssing, but veeerrryyy slowly. It reminded me of what my SO thinks of my DIY; I get 90% of the job done really quickly, but the last 10% can take forever…
Jason
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Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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something has gone wrong, check the instructions in the compressor help menu
“clusters
choosing for distributed processing 236
copying options 35
selecting 56
selecting storage locations 224
submitting jobs to 246
cluster segmenting 117
“cluster controllers
configuring with shell commands 245–246
enabling/disabling 245, 246”Cheers
Alexander
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