Compressor slower than molasses flowing uphill in winter

[treehorn]

Upgraded to the new Final Cut Pro suite last week and since then Compressor 3.5 has been running incredibly slow. Currently exporting a 90 minute SD film and it's taken 90 minutes...and I have 7 hours left! (Previously it would take 90 minutes to compress it)

Not sure what is happening. I've restarted the computer, I've repaired preferences, but it's still taking forever. I've had no problems with anything compressed not going through FCP, but this is the second film that is taking forever (the first was an HD going to SD DVD and I figured it was nature of the beast...now I'm not so sure...)

Any ideas?

 

[anthemus]

If you installed Qmaster your can run multiple instances and create your own cluster. This utilizes all the processors and dramatically improves your time.

Instructions from site:

Setting Up a Qmaster Cluster
The Qmaster is an automated system that Apple created to help with heavy-duty workflows, like working in Compressor. According to Wikipedia, it also works with Shake, Logic Studio, and even Alias Maya. Setting up a cluster is very easy, and this workflow is just to set one up with the processors in your computer, be it two or even eight.

First, open System Preferences (either from the Dock or the top toolbar under the Apple logo), and click on Apple Qmaster (under "Other," bottom of the menu). Click Stop Sharing (if it's currently on), and it's time to set it up. Look at how I set it above to get a feel for what may work for your system. If you have a quad-core or 8-core system, you'll want to set up 4 or 8 "instances." To do so, click on "Options for selected service." For my system, it defaults to 1- or 2-instances, since I only have a dual-core machine.

Here's the link:

http://finalcutpro.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=775135

 

[treehorn]

I've done that on another slower computer (that can't run Snow Leopard or the new FCS) and...didn't see much of a bump. Will try that on this one tomorrow and see what happens (So thanks .

Seems to be a problem with sharing/exporting via FCP though.

Gave up after 2 hours (it had jumped to 8 hours left and only completed 15%)

Exported the entire sequence and quit FCP and am compressing that.

And after 20 minutes, it's 23% completed, so huge change in speed...

 

[bigbossbmb]

don't EVER send to compressor directly from FCP... I hate that they still include it as an option.

go to File > Export > Export QT Movie... choose "same as sequence", do not recompress all frames, and make it self contained.

take the resulting file into compressor and choose your destination.

 

[treehorn]

don't EVER send to compressor directly from FCP... I hate that they still include it as an option.

go to File > Export > Export QT Movie... choose "same as sequence", do not recompress all frames, and make it self contained.

take the resulting file into compressor and choose your destination.

Yeah, but on a 2hr project...pain in the butt and major hard drive hog (and since it had worked perfectly fine in the previous version...)

Apple Discussion posts make claims that it is caused by not having done a clean install of Snow Leopard AND FCS

 

[FOXEO]

don't EVER send to compressor directly from FCP... I hate that they still include it as an option.

go to File > Export > Export QT Movie... choose "same as sequence", do not recompress all frames, and make it self contained.

take the resulting file into compressor and choose your destination.

I agree with this. MUCH faster results.

And, additionally, I recommend making sure the final Compressor video is being output to a different hard drive than the one that the original video is located on. Best to have one hard drive host the raw video data (in this case, the output video from FCP), and another for the final product (Compressor's output).

 

[ChemiosMurphy]

If you have CS4 also installed on your system, use the Adobe Media Encoder. Much faster and easier to use.

 

[bigbossbmb]

Yeah, but on a 2hr project...pain in the butt and major hard drive hog (and since it had worked perfectly fine in the previous version...)

Apple Discussion posts make claims that it is caused by not having done a clean install of Snow Leopard AND FCS

then do it not self-contained if you're so worried about HD space... but going to a QT movie first will always give you better performance.

 

[treehorn]

then do it not self-contained if you're so worried about HD space... but going to a QT movie first will always give you better performance.

Agreed and noted. And if a project is under 90 minutes I always export first. But after that point... (and yeah, I realize that it's on long projects like that where I would have seen a major speed increase...but as they always got done in a decent amount of time, it didn't seem like I would gain much when one considers how long it takes to export a 2 hour Quicktime)

I'm just curious as to why the upgrade has made it so that now your suggestion HAS to be implemented. As I said, there's a major downward bump (Pit?) in speed going on here. A project that last week would have taken under 2 hours to compress is now taking 12?

Seems like a flaw/bug to me