URGENT: Compressor won’t submit batch!

[Walter Biscardi]

There have been plenty of notices on this very forum NOT to upgrade to Leopard at least until Apple releases their Studio 2 updates.

Only thing I can suggest is to erase your Studio 2 installation and re-install everything. No guarantee that will work though.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Nick Long]

“There have been plenty of notices on this very forum NOT to upgrade to Leopard at least until Apple releases their Studio 2 updates. ”

Indeed, hence why it’s installed on my macbook pro and not in my edit suite. everything else is working fine, only compressor is crapping out.

I appreciate that it is a great warning to others and i’m glad that i’ve got my backup image of my tiger OS, however your advise is unhelpful.

What’s done is done and unfortunately i’m left needing to do an encode at home on my macbook pro.

“Only thing I can suggest is to erase your Studio 2 installation and re-install everything. No guarantee that will work though.”

after digging a little deeper, i doubt it will help.

The problem seems to lie in qmaster, not compressor. It seems qmaster doesn’t want to start no matter what i try. the “start service” button in system preferences is greyed out and i cannot select anything other than the checkboxes for the services i want to use.

trying to start or restart qmaster via terminal also does not work, though I must admit, my understanding of terminal is less than passable.

qmaster IS listed in my startup items folder, however it still doesn’t seem to run, even after a shutdown and reboot.

i think it’s highly strange that compressor should even need to access qmaster unless it actually has network encoding turned on! but then i’m not the one programming it for the mass market.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i don’t have time (or the disks here) for a reinstall.

It’s looking more likely that i’ll have to wait until i’m back in the office, but still need to get this fixed for the future.

Many Thanks

Nick Long
Senior Editor
OmniVision Limited

[Chad Self]

This happened to me a while back on my G5 Quad. The Apple forums were full of people who had this problem after upgrading Quicktime. I ended up doing a complete re-install of the OS. I can tell you from my experience that just installing FCP2 again did not work.

Hope I’m wrong for your sake.
C

[Matt Steeves]

I am having the exact same issues, have you resolved this?

[Nick Long]

Yesterday’s update to FCS2 fixed it.

Nick

[Chris Bizzocchi]

My basic setup is dual 2 Ghz G5 tower, 3gb ram, with FCP studio 2 installed …

Had this same Compressor problem which I recently discovered is had by many:
ie. Compressor is working fine … then suddenly FCP can’t access it when trying to export to compressor … trying to open it directly gives a stuck “about menu” … and there’s no ability to start a new job or batch manually, with those menu functions grayed out …

I tried many a re-install of FCP studio 2 elements and manual deletion of folder and preference elements with no success. in the end, the problem got worse and I couldn’t even open compressor without it immediately closing (with not even a crash dialog box opening up).

I didn’t have time to do a wipe and re-install of everything on my system. So, I gave up and simply started importing full-res quicktime movie exports from FCP into DVD studio pro and let that do my dvd compression. All in all very annoying … what with the extra steps and storage demands of exporting, waiting,and then importing.

Recently I tried to fix the problem again and seemed to have done it! Maybe this will help someone else …

I deleted the following files and folders …

— HD/Users/…/Library/Application Support/Compressor (entire folder)
— HD/Users/…/Library/Preferences/com.apple.compressor.Compressor.plist
— HD/Users/…/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Compressor.CompressorSharedService.plist
— HD/Library/Application Support/Compressor.framework (entire folder)

I also deleted the Final Cut Pro (application) and Compressor (application).

I did not bother deleting any other FCP preferences or folders, or any other FCP Studio 2 applications.

Then, I re-installed from FCP Studio 2 disks, trying to only select Final Cut Pro and Compressor to be installed. I chose to not let Qmaster manage clusters at the onset of the installation process.

I started up compressor and no luck at first … but then I did the latest updates for FCP and Compressor (3.0.2) (although I had already done these updates many times before) and lo and behold Compressor finally started up again, no problem. I couldn’t believe it! I think the frameworks folder may have been the key, because I don’t recall trying to delete that folder before …

All of this seemed extremely “ghost in the machine”y … many re-install attempts are fruitless and then finally months later it works??? Plus the problem itself seemed to come out of nowhere. IMHO, Compressor 2 and FCP 5 were a much better pair … version 3 added a lot of useless interface and tabbed job management to compressor and needlessly introduced a lot of instability in the process.

Hope this maybe helps someone else!

[Nick Long]

“version 3 added a lot of useless interface and tabbed job management to compressor and needlessly introduced a lot of instability in the process. ”

I couldn’t agree more. The interface is incredibly sluggish. I think it’s stupid that I have to click a window to activate it before it registers mouse clicks. Integration with Episode is clunky and not having presets available from episode is stupid.

I’m just glad that at least I can encode an mpeg-2. I count myself lucky that works (for now).

Nick

Nick Long – Video Editor

n.long@mac.com

[Chris Bizzocchi]

“The interface is incredibly sluggish. I think it’s stupid that I have to click a window to activate it before it registers mouse clicks.”

Totally sluggish!! I swear the old compressor worked much faster and smoother.

I forgot to add that my compressor 3 solution mentioned above was with 10.4.11, not 10.5.

And while we’re on the topic of compressor 3 problems … I’ve encountered some strange things:

1) Sometimes when exporting to DVD files (m2v + ac3) my export to the AC3 file will get stuck in a permanent loop. It can’t quite complete the file compression procedure and won’t procede to the m2v compression until I cancel the ac3 output (thus wasting time AND destroying what was essentially a 99.99% complete and probably working ac3 file). This problem is totally intermittent (1 out of every 10 encodes or so).

Perhaps this has to do with the whole batch management thing … why once it submits the file to batch monitor, does compressor immediately have an exclamation symbol in your batch window, letting you know you already have that file? Of course I do … I just submitted it!!! Is this what is confusing compressor and the finder? Again, what is the point of saving a batch management associated with a particular output? To me it’s all about preset management and workflow management, not batch management associated with a particular output. I usually want to output a new file in similar ways, not a similar file in new ways. Maybe I want to output one file in numerous ways, but why would I need to save this batch? I just don’t get what the benefits are supposed to be.

2) When outputting 16×9 NTSC DVD outputs (m2v + ac3) from 16×9 FCP 6 timelines (both standard and hi-def) to Compressor 3, I find that white titles on black backgrounds almost always end up getting aspect distortion. Most annoying is that they display for a few frames properly, then blip to stretched out text for most of their screen time, before blipping back to proper aspect a few frames before disappearing. SO ANNOYING! I believe this is only a problem with FCP generated text, not imported titles from AfterFX or LiveType or Motion.

Neither of these seemed to be a problem with Compressor 2.

[Brian Alexander]

After many many many hours of pulling my hair out and even trying Terminal commands I’ve finally fixed my issue!

I tried everything except the re-install first then when nothing else worked I deleted all the files listed in this article: https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1888?viewlocale=en_US

My next step was to use the app Pacifist (https://www.charlessoft.com/) to extract just the Compressor and Motion installers from the FCP Install DVD and it did it!

Argghh!

Good luck!

[Flick Harrison]

I had a medium-difficult solution.

I tried everything mentioned in this thread, and finally Compressor Repair.

It couldn’t fix it, and recommended re-installing the whole thing. But it said I was missing the following files:

/usr/sbin/qmasterca
/usr/sbin/qmasterqd
/usr/sbin/qmasterd
/usr/sbin/qmasterprefs
/usr/local/lib/libhelium_mac.a

It looked like this for each:

/usr/local/lib/libhelium_mac.a does not exist. You are advised to reinstall Compressor / Qmaster.

So I decided to use Time Machine to restore them. I’m finally in love with Time Machine!

But Time Machine wouldn’t show hidden files, including the /usr/ folder.

So I had to turn on “Reveal Hidden Files”

https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/34132

‘Cos I didn’t feel like attacking this task in the terminal. Yeesh! I had to manually click through all the backups with the /usr/local/lib/ folder open, until I finally found the files.

BTW, the search function in Time Machine wouldn’t find them, either ‘cos spotlight doesn’t index hidden files, or Time Machine won’t find them, but I was pleasantly surprised that Reveal Hidden Files actually stayed active in Time Machine! Stroke of luck.

So then I restored these files, except for libhelium_mac.a which wasn’t present in any backup. ??!?

Now compressor is chugging away as always.

The problem seems to have arisen – judging from the date when the files disappeared from the Time Machine backups – when I had a particularly harsh video card crash, corrupted my system while trying to diagnose / repair the card, then had to do an archive-install via my Mac repair guy.