[Harry Powell]

Rafael, I’m not sure if I understand your question correctly, but what I meant was, I export the ProRes in the Timeline as a self-contained QT movie, at current settings. I then put this self-contained QT movie in Compressor.

Are you suggesting I should be ‘sending’ to Compressor? I see that option for sending to Soundtrack Pro and Motion, but I can’t see this for Compressor.

[Harry Powell]

I did select the virtual cluster. In terms of instances .. that’s an interesting question.

For a while now my Qmaster settings have been set at 6 instances. I chose 6 because I have an ‘8-core’ Mac Pro, so thought it probably best to leave 2 free to run other apps.

However, according to the iStats graphic monitoring of core activity, it looks like all 8 cores are being fully used by Qmaster. This seems consistent with the fact that FCP runs quite sluggish while Compressor/Qmaster is doing it’s encoding.

Am I correct to equate cores with instances? If so, why are 8 being used when 6 have been selected?

[Harry Powell]

Hi Dave

Apologies for any confusion caused, but how does this from my initial post, not make it clear the type of footage in my FCP edit timeline?

“Compressor is estimating over 30 hours to encode an 11 minute 1080i ProRes (self-contained from FCP) to 720p H.264”

i.e. ProRes ?

[Harry Powell]

Thanks again for the extra tip Rafael. I’ll make sure to do that.

[Harry Powell]

Thanks! Not sure if there is time .. but what do you mean by ‘settings’? Do you mean in Quicktime?

[Harry Powell]

Just to update …

In the end I gave up on the encode as it was taking too long. Also when I opened Batch Processor, I could see that it was still trying to encode the 11 minute edit, even though I had paused and deleted it from Compressor.

I then decided to stick with ‘better’ settings rather than ‘best’ in Frame Controls panel, and the encode finished within an hour.

Thanks for your advice.

Now I have a new problem! (see new thread)

[Harry Powell]

Thanks Rafael for the repair programme. I’ll use it next time I have a problem.

In the end I opened Batch Processor and I could see that it was still trying to encode the 11 minute edit, even though I had paused and deleted it from Compressor.

I then decided to stick with ‘better’ settings rather than ‘best’ in Frame Controls panel, and the encode finished within an hour.

I think, based on my initial 2 minute clip test, the ‘best’ settings would have taken about 24 hours so don’t have time for that.

Now I have a different problem! (which perhaps I’ll start a new thread with?), i.e. I have intermittent thin grey dashes at the bottom edge of the movie. Very distracting!

Any ideas?

[Harry Powell]

Thanks Rafael for your suggestion.

Can you please tell me what exactly what I should look at in Activity Monitor?

There are various Compresssor related things listed and not sure which is most relevant and whether I should be looking at CPU or threads or …?

[Harry Powell]

UPDATE

I’ve just checked my original test done with the best settings listed in my first post.

It was a 2 minute sample and it took Compressor under 4 hours to complete.

And just to update you on my latest 2 second clip test (with deinterlace downgraded to better from best) .. it is now predicting 16 hours for completion.

?!

[Harry Powell]

OK I’ve switched from best to better on deinterlacing, and I’m testing this on just a 2 seconds sample, i.e. a self-contained export from Final Cut.

Compressor has been encoding this for 50 minutes, and is predicting completion in over 10 hours! And steadily increasing all the time.

QMaster is running and iStats shows all 8 cores being fully utilised.

Surely this can’t be right? Seems to have got worse?