[Anthony Dias]

Please see the image that goes along with this post.

In the system preferences qmaster settings, make sure you choose “quickcluster with services” and also make sure you press the “start sharing” button.

Then, it should appear in Compressor as a cluster that you can submit to.

Now, I’m not sure that this cures the blockiness problem, but it did in my case. I have a suspicion as to why, but I don’t know for sure. Good luck.

[Anthony Dias]

Hi Gabriel,

The issues you have don’t sound normal and I would be tempted to return the machine and get another one… but before you do that, maybe you can give us some more info such as:

1) What are your Scratch Disk settings?

2) How fast is your Data Hard Drive
-This question assumes that you are using a dedicated hard drive for your system and applications and a separate dedicated hard drive for your video footage (both with a minimum of 7200 RPM).

3) What format is the footage are you using the most that has this problem? DV? XDCAM? H264? (before encoding to ProRes)?

4) Do you have these issues when the Matrox is NOT connected to your system?

5) Do you have any other software on your machine that uses the Graphics Card (i.e. BlackMagic Davinci… which wreaked havoc when I tried installing it on my machine… never mind that I couldn’t use it anyway because it doesn’t run on ATI cards)

6) Are you using the internet or specifically Flash based websites while editing?

7) Are you connected to the internet on this machine while editing? (not that it should matter)

8) Are you using an external audio interface and what kind?

9) Are you accessing ANY of your footage from your local computer network?

If you can try to answer these questions one at a time with a bit of detail, perhaps we can find the gremlin that is wreaking havoc.

peace,
-Tony

[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.

[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]

Pablo,

I would like to know if you ever found a solution to your problem or if it was a one time issue?

I am having similar issues and I am trying to figure out if it’s me, quicktime, xdcam transfer or something else.

Sorry to revive an old post.

To all the skeptics…

Please ignore this thread unless you have an actual solution.

• In XDCAM Transfer, I can clearly hear both channels (panned hard left and right)

• After conversion to MOV files (still xdcam codec)… everything is MONO with no difference between channel 1 and 2.

• Extracting the audio file into Logic and splitting the channels from interleaved gives me two identical waveforms.

• I tried panning the split audio files Hard Left/Hard Right in their own tracks. Then I threw a multimeter on the out 1-2 in Goniometer mode and the reading was straight down the middle.

—

I have successfully transferred countless hours of EX1 footage before without ever having this problem.

I will, but haven’t yet tried importing directly in FCP with Log & Transfer.

I am using FCP 7.0.3 and XDCAM Transfer 2.12.0
Mac Pro 2X3 GHz Quad w/10GB RAM and a few terabytes of storage on 4 internal drives and one external G-Safe

[Anthony Dias]

Maybe Apple will adopt a BitTorrent style distribution system built in to the installer?

[Anthony Dias]

Michael,

Thank You 🙂

I have upgraded to the ATI 5870 and the dropped frames issue has gone away.

-Tony

[Anthony Dias]

I’m posting on here just in case some poor soul out there runs into the same problem that has been plaguing my workflow for over a year and a half.

I guess the problem was that I was trying to drive a 30 inch monitor at full 2560 x 1600 resolution AND trying to edit video at the same time. (Even though, if I remember correctly, it should have been enough according to the marketing information on Apple’s web site back then).

Anwyay, last night, I opened up my Mac Pro 3,1 (2x3GHz Quad Nehalem) and I upgraded the NVIDIA 8800 GT (512 GB VRAM) card to an ATI 5870 (1024 GB VRAM).

Today, NO MORE DROPPED FRAMES!

I still have the Matrox MXO 2 LE hooked up.

I still have the Digidesign MBox Pro 2 on its own firewire bus (PTLE 8.x)

FCP is working just GREAT!

I can finally edit sequences in 1920×1080 and not worry about dropped frames.

Cheers,
-Tony

[Anthony Dias]

hmmm…. web host seems to be having issues and I can’t upload my files right now… or even access my website.

I will put up a zip file of screenshots and stuff like that when the server is back up (hopefully soon).

Anyway, I have been repeating the dropped frames issue just now and the virtual memory thing is inconsistent.

The problem does seem to be exacerbated by opening multiple applications, but my experience is that I have been able to replicate the problem in the past without having anything but the Finder and Final Cut Pro.

Now, concerning Virtual Memory, somewhere on the internet I read that the 16 EB number could result if a 64 bit number went negative. And one time I did notice that the Virtual Memory went from 130 MB or so down to almost 0 MB and then to 16EB. So maybe the virtual memory is hitting zero and showing up as an unsigned zero? lol, that’s just a wild guess

I have tried various forms of installing and unisntalling but to be honest, I can’t remember every step I’ve tried.

Anyway, here are my non-apple kernel extensions and I am noticing that there is one from Apogee that I don’t even use anymore which I will uninstall in a bit. Then, if that isn’t the culprit, I’ll get rid of SoundFlower as well. But I kinda want to do this one at a time.

I have already uninstalled the DigiDesign stuff before and that didn’t make a difference (although I’m not sure how good their uninstaller is)

96 0 0x1aa9000 0x1a000 0x19000 com.digidesign.iokit.DigiDal (8.0.4f2) <14 5 4 3 1>
97 0 0x1ac3000 0x7000 0x6000 com.digidesign.iokit.DigiIO (8.0.4f2) <17 14 5 4 3>
99 0 0x94b000 0x2000 0x1000 com.Apogee.driver.DuetFWOverideDriver (1.4.4) <48 11 5 4 3 1>
101 0 0x969000 0x4000 0x3000 com.Cycling74.driver.Soundflower (1.2.1) <94 93 8 5 4 3 1>
102 7 0x1aca000 0x9000 0x8000 com.matrox.vpg.DriverHelpers (1.0.0d1) <5 4 3 1>
103 0 0x1be0000 0x3a000 0x39000 com.matrox.vpg.MXO2Driver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
105 0 0x1a8c000 0x1d000 0x1c000 com.digidesign.fwfamily.driver (8.0.4f2) <104 94 48 5 4 3 1>
120 0 0x1bdd000 0x3000 0x2000 com.matrox.vpg.ClockDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
121 0 0x1c28000 0x10000 0xf000 com.matrox.vpg.VideoOutputDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
122 0 0x1c21000 0x7000 0x6000 com.matrox.vpg.VideoInputDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
123 0 0x1ad3000 0x9000 0x8000 com.matrox.vpg.AudioDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 94 5 4 3 1>
125 0 0x1c1a000 0x7000 0x6000 com.matrox.vpg.RS422Driver (1.0.0d1) <124 102 5 4 3 1>
126 0 0x1adc000 0x101000 0x100000 com.matrox.vpg.AvcCodecDriver (1.0.0d1) <102 5 4 3 1>
130 0 0x1c38000 0x3000 0x2000 com.paceap.kext.pacesupport.snowleopard (5.7.2) <7 5 4 3 1>
video-productions-mac-pro-2:~ videoproduction$

[Anthony Dias]

Jeff,

I think you may be a genius 🙂

I just looked over my screenshots from last week and I noticed that the process WindowServer is using anywhere from 60 to 120 MegaBytes of Virtual Memory when FCP is working properly.

However, when the dropped frames begin to happen, WindowServer is using 16 EB of virtual memory (EXABYTES?!?!?!)

My understanding is that 16 ExaBytes is the theoretical limit of on a 64-bit system.

So, my guess is that there is something wrong going on here and that WindowServer should NOT be eating up this much Virtual Memory? Am I right?

Thanks,
-Tony