Long Compressing time in Compressor

[Superfluouseb]

Compressor is slow… but usually not that slow.

what are the specs of your CPU?

[George Burbano]

Hi and thanks for the interest in helping.

I did put the info in my post but here goes. Im using a Mac Dual Proc. 2.5 G5 tower, with 8gigs of ram and medea raid drive. Im exporting the file thru compressor using the Web Setting for Quicktime 7 which works and produces great files for me. In the frame size setting, Im using 320 x240.

the video is shot on a HVX 200, in 720P60 and edited on FCP 5.2. Once edited, Im exporting to compressor with the settings above. It is pretty slow… some of the specs I have read do complain about the 1 hr per 10min time rate for compressing… So Im sure it is not my machine, since everything works fine with no problem.

When exporting I do export the timeline from my raid drive, to the internal sata drive. All specs, and recomendations have indicated that exporting from 1 fast drive to another fast drive is better than working and exporting within the same drive.

Really my question is have anyone used elgato, hardware usb device used to speed up compresion.

Second question is are there any hardware compression device that will work on a mac which will speed up the process. We are trying to make the video shot available online faster than now. It presently takes us about 4hrs to get it out and to the web clients.

1hr. editing, 2hrs+ , compressing and then another 1hr to get it into the right flash or web format..

tks

George

[Daniel Low]

Not having access to compressor at this time, could you remind us by detailing the ‘Web setting’.
The things that slow encode times down are multi-pass encoding, and any other settings that are on ‘Best’ rather than ‘better’ or ‘normal’ like deinterlacing etc.

[George Burbano]

Using 320×240, AAC Stereo, 100 % frame rate, multi pass on, H264 at 800kbps.

These are the pertinent settings, I know using higher levels of compressing and shutting off multi pass, can decrease the time, but I have tried these and the quality suffers, especially with more motion in the video. I really do think, that there isnt much to fix other than, to either find some hardware solution, or seriously compromise quality.
But thanks for your interest and answer.

George

[Daniel Low]

You could try some alternative routes using either:

MPEG Streamclip:
https://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

or ffMPEGx
https://homepage.mac.com/major4/

or isquint:
https://www.isquint.org/

All of them should be (much) faster than Compressor.

or take a look at the Elgato Turbo H.264 hardware accelerator product.

[Nathan Veer]

I have yet to find an affordable hardware encoder that does multipass encoding. Both Elgato and Matrox’s solutions only do single pass. Form my testing these devices the multipass option makes all the difference in quality. Compressor is slow, especially on a G5 (even if it’s dual) but it looks great. However, when I’m in a pinch and I don’t have the time I can achieve 90% of the quality with mpegstreamclip. Search it on google. It’s a wonderful, free encoder. I love it.1

[Craig Seeman]

I’m not sure how you tested but Matrox CompressHD single pass looks as good as or better than Apple’s H.264 multipass. I’m am certainly not the only one who’s noted that.

[Nathan Veer]

Not even close. I actually did my testing with the Matrox Engineers in Canada. In the end I sent them My custom settings and some uncompressed footage and asked them to tear it to pieces and show me what I was doing wrong. After several weeks of trying to match COmpressor’s settings the engineers themselves responded by saying they can’t come close and that they are working on including multipass encoding. They were great to work with and very helpful but facts are facts. To obtain good quality while achieving small file sizes you have to have multi pass.

Single pass encoding is like asking your encoder to fly blind. It has no idea what’s coming up. With multipass it at least knows where the scene changes are and fast motion so it can allocate more data to those areas.

[Craig Seeman]

https://www.suitetake.com/2009/11/06/review-matrox-compress-hd-pcie-card/

Image Quality
The image quality is as good as anything coming out of compressor natively, but at a fraction of the time. In all of the tests that we did I couldn’t see a quality difference between using the card or not.

https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/news/story/matrox_releases_support_for_new_final_cut_studio/

Quality is better than Compressor Single-pass. Matrox High Quality presets use the MAX hardware exclusively, thereby freeing-up CPU power for other tasks. Quality is comparable to Compressor Multi-pass.

and there are others who would disagree with you. Of course any given source media may be different but I would not say generally that MAX at single pass is worse than Apple at multipass. There were times that I found the even MAX with it’s simple tick box for deinterlace did a better job than Compressor Frame Controls set to Better.

[Nathan Veer]

As you said every source video is different and it depends what kind of bandwidth you’re talking about. I’m talking about encoding for Web. Anything looks decent at high bandwidth. Once you get down to 700 or 500 that is where you can tell the good compressors from the great ones. You can take it up with Matrox them selves. Ask for Jean Pierre.