[Mr. Sophistication]

I always use 2 pass encodes with motion estimation quality on Best.

You bring up a good point… since I’ve upgraded to FCP 5, there may be some different settings I’ve selected for render quality, etc. I’m pretty sure I’ve checked my sequence settings to make sure there isn’t any difference in my render quality, but I do remember some window that pops up when I launch a FCP 4.5 project asking what type of quality settings I’d like to set the project at (whereas Linear is FCP 4.5 default setting). I’m pretty sure I’ve selected Normal each time… a step below Best, but a step above FCP 4.5 Linear setting.

I’m going to investigate this further. Thanks for your help and suggestions.

[Mr. Sophistication]

Thanks for the feedback.

Unfortunately, the 3800 Mb export I told you about did not include audio at all- this was strictly a video export (I used to use A Pac to export my audio, but now a Dolby 5.1 AC-3 audio preset is available in Compressor 2).

What really baffles me about Compressor 2 are the inconsistent results I keep getting. Last night I left 2 timelines exporting, both about 2 hours in length… I used the same average data rate for both, and one of them was 2.9 GB while the other was a whopping 4.6 GB.

Until I find out why I’m getting these varying results, I’m just going to scratch batch exporting from Compressor 2 and export using a Quicktime Conversions within FCP5 for each timeline individually.