-
Is Compressor a serious product?
I’m always puzzled by Apple Compressor. I like a lot the interface, I like to use it offline for transcoding. It’s dramatically slow, we are in 2017 and to see only 21% of my resources used is depressing. Sure I could use an iMac with the HW encoding for H264 but I rather use my MacPro with dual Xeon and twelve physical cores.
I’d like to use it very badly but I always end up using the free “HandBrake” product. It uses my cores so well that it’s even 400% faster than compressor for equivalent quality. It is virtually bug-free and while Compressor is not an expensive product I would expect some more CPU utilization by Apple at this point. HandBrake can do it, why Apple can’t? What is your experience with it?Gabriele – California
-
47 Replies
-
How do you have it setup?
Have you looked in the preferences and turned on the “enable additional instances”?
What are you compressing and what kind of processing are you adding, if any?
-
Yes, thanks. Sure I try 1,2,3,4,5 I always get my CPU usage around 25-27% using the same test file. I run tests with H264 output that is my typical format. For testing purposes, I tested with the preset 1080P available in compressor.
Gabriele – California
-
[Gabriele Sartori] ” For testing purposes, I tested with the preset 1080P available in compressor.”
In “Video Sharing Services” or which 1080p setting?
-
Do you have settings set that could be turned off that you don’t need to speed up the process.
-
I tested many settings. Simple or complicated I just can’t fill the CPU pipelines. Same Mac Pro with “HandBrake” I get 80% sometimes even 90% of CPU utilization and the quality is great. This CPU utilization with Handbrake let me compress really, really fast. FYI I did SW compression for 20 years and design compression solution in HW and SW myself, I know the parameters. I’m wondering what is your CPU occupation doing HD H264 compression with Compressor. I was never able to use it due to the slowness. It could be the Apple H264 Codec that is not multithreaded I don’t know, but in this case why Apple doesn’t do a new codec? They had major advances in speed with Final Cut, it is time that we see compressor using all the cores available, we are in 2017. It is still possible that I do something wrong although it doesn’t seem to me. I’m wondering about the results you guys get from it.
Gabriele – California
-
I get multicore/thread all the time on my MacPro using Compressor.
This is why I am wondering what you’re doing to the settings.
Screengrabs would help.
-
Have an 87 minute timeline, ProRes 422 HQ, 24fps 1080, a single file (no cuts, no titles, no corrections). Send to Compressor, output h.264, resize to 960 x 540, 6835 kbps … on a 2013 MacBook Pro 13″ Retina w/16GB RAM and 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7. My Apple Activity Monitor graphic bars always max out.
Doug D
-
Yes but that it’s relatively easy. You don’t have 12 cores on two CPU and separate memory channels.
Gabriele – California
-
Right. I don’t understand what happens with the 12 cores and 2 threads. Is the theory that since the processing is distributed over so many cores, there is less usage of each? Or, is your opinion that, ALL cores/threads should be used to the max, and processing should therefore occur much more quickly? I guess what I need to do is try the output I described to you using Handbrake, and see if the times differ? The 87 PR422 to h.264 I described takes about 46 minutes.
Doug D
-
Yeah, parallel programming is complicated. Video compression lends itself to it because you can assign different task to different 8×8 (or other square sizes) blocks but there is a limit to that since you have to tie everything together. I do have a Macbook 13″, core i5 and I fill both CPU four thread, I used to have an i7 before and I almost filled the 4 cores, you are also scaling down and doing other things so maybe there are more parallel tasks. With the 12 cores 24 threads I get between 25 to 30% of overall CPU utilization that it’s about equivalent to 4 cores indeed.
Problem is that I bought years ago this monster assuming that I would run faster than a quad core MacBook. It never did with Compressor, it does it with FCPX and Handbrake . Pretty depressing. Apple next month with be out with a 18 cores machine. Will they do something about this? I’m not too upset because handbrake is freaking fast but I really wish the integrated environment. Normally what I do I export with a lightweight codec so the export is very fast and then I pass it with Handbrake. Thanks for the help
Gabriele – California
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up