[Noah Leon]

That was one of my solutions in the end as well. I pine for the days when Apple had a decent pro department working on these things, now they don’t seem to care. Enter Adobe, I guess. I love Apple software but I don’t think I can deal with the perpetual abandonment anxiety anymore.

[Noah Leon]

Thanks Shane, and God bless Divergent Media and EditReady, but I am definitely not interested in converting to ProRes, since those files (while beautiful) will be too big to send quickly over the web.

I’m still amazed that this could just not be supported in Compressor. I regularly email them about these things, but Apple seem to have no interest in fixing… anything.

[Noah Leon]

This happens to me all the time too. Is this just a CS6 problem or is it built in to premiere?

[Noah Leon]

Hi Shane,

XAVC-s is actually just high profile h.264. It’s tightly compressed which is why it requires a lot of horsepower to decode.

The make proxies option in FCPX is great, and I use it sometimes to reduce the load of XAVC-s on my system. However, even ProRes proxy is 45mbits/second, and XAVC-s is 50mbits/second and variable (so it could be less if there is not much motion in a scene). So it’s not much of a savings and degrades the quality quite a bit.

I also realize that you lose a lot of necessary info in compressing with Handbrake, which is why I am asking my original question about Compressor (maybe it’s irrational for me to be hell-bent on using this piece of Apple software, but even Adobe CS6 from 2010-2011 has no trouble with this format, and this is the latest version of Compressor 4 we are talking about here).

Ideally, I want to batch-convert a bunch of files, leave it overnight to upload to dropbox, and have my guy on the other end have the files magically appear on his system in the morning through Dropbox.

I have used this workflow several times with Canon DSLR footage, and it works fine. The problem is that Compressor cannot seem to open the .mp4 files generated by my Sony cam. I’ll try to attach one here if anyone else would be interested in trying.

9120_c0122.mp4.zip

[Noah Leon]

Thanks, Dave, I have definitely considered that. In fact, I could probably compress it just enough to fit on the large SD card and that would be even cheaper to mail.

However, my original question is mostly just why can’t I open my files and compressor. Is anyone else having this problem with XAVC-s footage, for example?

If someone was willing to try it, I could post a link to a couple of clips.

[Noah Leon]

Thanks. I have the latest Compressor. I thought it was perhaps a buggy install or something, but I tried it on two computers with many different files.

Edit ready sounds good, but I feel like Apple owes it to me that the software I purchased work.

I am actually converting the footage to a lower bit-rate to send via web to another editor in another part of the country. This reduces the files size by about 90% (taking a 200GB project down to 20GB) and when the edit is done he sends back the project file and I reconnect it to the high quality media.

I ended up using Handbrake, of all things, and it worked OK, but I still would really like to use the Compressor workflow as Handbrake is a clunky workaround.

[Noah Leon]

James, your tip is absolutely right. Thanks for saving me the headache of trying what the others were suggesting. I added an audio track to my multi clip sequence. It was a live event and I had the board-recorded audio but I wanted to add the natural audio because they had a tam-tam player, who didn’t really come through on the recorded audio. I was able to select all the “clips” created by my multi clip editing and simply select the tracks to use–the natural audio and the board-recorded audio. FCPX has a lot of stuff hidden in the Inspector on the right, that was one of the cool items.

[Noah Leon]

I found a solution to this issue here: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1202924

Basically, you keep your project files and associated stuff on the local system drive, and your media on your external or second drive. For some reason, this helps.

[Noah Leon]

Thanks Slav,

Unfortunately it didn’t solve my problem, my iMac has no ASIO audio device. The audio devices it has are pretty simplistic with few options. I’m guessing either that you’re on a PC or have some add-on audio hardware? You might be on to something with the 32-bits thing. I may try checking in my Mac’s Audio Midi Setup (for anyone reading this who is having the same problem on a Mac, you can control the audio devices better through Audio Midi Setup which is in the utilities folder). I will try degrading it a bit, perhaps it’s just getting overloaded.