[David Bauman]

Thank you very much! Works great.

[David Bauman]

Forgive my ignorance, but when I open up the HUD there doesn’t seem to be any drop zone or well for me to put the text layer into. I typed in my text, imported my video clip which took up the screen, went to image mask, and made a rectangular mask over the video (so when I move the mask away from the video image, it just shows the black, and I opened up the HUD, and tried to drag the text group into the HUD, but to no avail. Am I adding my image mask improperly perhaps?

[David Bauman]

Thanks, this seems to be working actually. Can’t figure out definitively where the break was, but I made sure all the clips were connected properly, and exported as a reference movie. As of right now, 29 percent progress in Compressor with 2 and half hours remaining. So good sign, fingers crossed. Thanks!

[David Bauman]

Thanks. I actually forgot to mention, the movie was exported as a reference movie, instead of self contained for the sake of file space. That’s worked for me on all the other movies in this set of movies I’m editing. However I’m going to go ahead and try re-exporting it as a self-contained movie, maybe that will make a difference. It just doesnt make sense to me that dvds burned for all the others when they were saved as reference movies. But maybe this will work.

[David Bauman]

Thanks. I just tried this. Restarted compressor. I thought maybe it had did something, everything started processing. But it’s doing the same thing again where it gets to 23 percent and pauses.

Is there some other kind of compression software I could by that is an equivalent to compressor? I’m going to try all of this on another computer this evening with compressor to see if it’s a computer related issue–though I can’t imagine what it would be since it’s all worked fine up till this video–but if I tried compression with different software that supported MPEG-2, maybe I could figure out if there’s something wrong with my FCP original file.

[David Bauman]

Well, the problem is still not solved. At 23 percent progress, the time begins to simply increase. It’s been about two and a half hours and the progress bar was moving. Now it’s not, it just gives me a higher and higher estimate of time, and I’m not at all confident it will move past 23 percent progress.

[David Bauman]

Have you burned any dvds and then put them into a dvd player after you’ve used compressor? Sometimes what looks back on your computer after a burn through compressor actually looks just fine on most DVDs. The thing with HD video is unless you’re burning to a blue-ray disk, you’re inevitably going to have to deal with losing some quality. The first time I encountered that I panicked, thought my work had all been for nothing. But I showed the dvd to a few people on their dvd players, and they all thought the quality looked fine. It will look shakier when you look at it on your computer, it will look a bit more grainy than it did in your editing program, but even so, it’s going to look better than most VHS tapes ever would.

MPEG-2 format is very capable at standardizing footage without losing a horrendous amount of quality when you’re burning footage to dvd.

There’s also a lot of image softening techniques you can look into.

Advice from Craig Seemen to me a month or so ago that I found helpful

“If you’re going to make a DVD, welcome to the world of downconverting HD to SD. You have no choice but to lose tons of quality. There are ways to mitigate some issues but without any information I can’t make any suggestions.

These two articles will give you an idea of what you’re up against
https://www.xdcam-user.com/2011/03/getting-good-sd-from-an-hd-camera/

https://www.xdcam-user.com/2009/11/getting-sd-from-hd-and-the-problems-of-oversampling/

Basically you may have to soften the image.”

Maybe this will help?

[David Bauman]

Have you tried going to the compressor menu under “file” and clicking, reset background processing? Also check your batch monitor first to make sure nothing else is running. If it is, or if it’s just sitting there, listed as canceled, I’d try resetting the background processing.

[David Bauman]

For anyone else having trouble, a potential simple solution would be to go to the Compressor file menu, and click, “RESET BACKGROUND PROCESSING”. This clears any history of other batches, canceled or not, and when I clicked on this, and resubmitted my job, it began processing almost immediately.

[David Bauman]

I am using Mac OS X, version 10.6.8 with a 3.2 GHz i3 core.
Compressor version 3.5.3
This is for DVD output.
Apple intermediate codec 720p30 was used, when I placed footage in the FCP timeline, it suggested this setting be used.
The setting I used is DVD MPEG-2 Video .m2v which was the default setting for when you open up compressor and it asks about your job action. I said DVD. That’s the setting it gave me. It’s worked perfectly fine up till now, taking about five-six hours per dvd thus far.