[Eric Weiner]

Hey, William Car has the actual solution to my problem that I originally posted about. I found that trashing compressor prefs. helped, but that was because i was compressing other types of footage. I found that compressor only slowed down when I was converting H264 flies later on, but by then forgot about this tread so I didn’t come back to update. (Then I got an e-mail today with a responce.)

Converting HD files from a Cannon 5D to SD center cut is part of my daily workflow now, and it still slows compressor GUI down on every mac I’ve ever worked on. Log and Transferring the files would work, but I don’t like the doing the extra step if I can avoid it. So what I find is that I simply budget in the time that Compressor spins. I’ve found that if I’m doing 100 clips, it will spin and look like it’s crashing for about 1.5 hours, and a 8 core mac pro machine. I haven’t been able to come up with a real hard and fast rule for how much time it will spin for, but I just expect the spinning to happen and deal with it accordingly. It takes less time than log and transferring all the files would, and then I don’t have annoying intermediary files to keep track of or store. I think there are other programs out there to deal with 5D stuff, and I really should look into them, but I really like how compressor, once a batch is submitted, can use the multicore function to rip though the files.

Not sure what types of file you are converting, but if it’s H264 files this is probably what’s going on.

[Eric Weiner]

Thanks Michael. I did have that setting checked which is why I was thinking that I had the right setting. However, I figured out I need to switch Base Media file name on from existing file names, to existing clip names.

I figure it has something to do with the fact that when it is based on file names, it is re-capturing the whole clip, even if I only use 3 seconds of it, but for what ever reason, switching it to the file name allows it to see each small cut in the timeline as a 3 second clip.

Must be funny for those of you who have been doing this awhile to have a someone asking a simple Online question. I’ve been working since 2008, and this is honestly my first real experience on-lining anything, and there isn’t anyone who works here than has really done it, at least not for several years. If this goes smoothy, we may start cutting in a off line codex, with the idea of on-lining at the end to save on drive space and internal network bandwidth. I thought 80 TB system would be more than enough since we mostly cut and deliver in SD, but our system is filling up quick.

Thanks!

[Eric Weiner]

I thought about capturing HD, but the way our system is set up we didn’t have the space on our system. (We use a Maxx Digital’s Final Share system, we have 80TBs of space, but we also have a lot of different projects going on at the same time, and capturing HD would have eaten up to much of it When they only wanted SD.)

Thanks, that’s what I’m trying now. I’m having a few problems though.

1. Again, there are several different sequences, the one I’m doing now is the smallest (5 mins.) but it’s still capturing each tape for 10-30 mins of footage.

2. I’m getting errors on each tape, it says things like can’t access the timecode on tapes, and other problems, so it doesn’t seem to be going smoothy, plus it going to take almost a whole day just to reconnect this one 5 min. sequence. I thought i picked the most restrictive settings I could when made the off-line media manage, but maybe I still have some bad option clicked somewhere?

Thanks for the help by the way, also I really like The Edit Bay.

[Eric Weiner]

I seemed to have fixed my problem by trashing Compressor settings. I have yet to try on more than one computer, but it totally fixed my slow GUI problems on my main computer.

Now when I drop a preset onto a bunch of files, it only thinks for 20-30 seconds before I can hit submit. Hope this can helps others, if I have so many computers with the problem, it must be somewhat wide spread. Or maybe everyone else knows to trash their compressor settings every once in a while and don’t run into the problem?

I threw away the files as shown in this article.

https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1888

I’m going to make sure this works with my other computers as well, I’ll get back to this if it doesn’t fix one of them.

Thanks for the help everyone!

[Eric Weiner]

Sadly no, even if there isn’t anything else running it still behaves slowly. I’ll check out to see what Compressor is doing in activity monitor and get back with results.

All computers are Mac Pros, either 4 or 8 core. (mostly 8 core)

[Eric Weiner]

I”m guessing NLE means Non-Linear Editing (system). We use Final Cut Pro, but I wasn’t able to find any meta data relating to shot mode. However, it’s highly posable I just wasn’t looking in the correct place.

It seems like I should be able to play the tape in the camera itself to find out, I’ll give that a try.