FCP/Compressor Workflow Opinions

[Magaman]

Now that I have a new fancy ACVHD camera I've been able to finally start using Final Cut Studio. First I'm doing this all on a MBP 2.5ghz Duo 4 gigs of Ram. I've been trying a lot of testing with different settings, and really don't know if what I'm doing is 100% correct. Most of what I shoot will be used for Youtube/Blip.tv. At first I was doing my edit then using SEND TO COMPRESSOR in FCP. I've tried the various compressor presets, and no matter what I use a 5 minute clip takes a real long time to encode around 50mins. However I found if I do an Export Quicktime Movie using the current setting(which is Pro Res 422), Final Cut exports rather quick, and then my Compressor Encode takes about 10 minutes. Even with all the same settings? Quality wise it all looks the same no matter which way I go about it. Is it normal that going directly form FCP to Compressor take forever?

Also what are some presets that others have found that look great with a small file size. From my tinkering I've found exporting as an m4v has given me the best quality and decent file size and rather speedy encode

 

[yoak]

Your workflow is the best way of doing things. Export to compressor is buggy at best. You can't use all cores as a cluster to speed things up etc.
You can set up a virtual cluster using Qmaster and it will speed things up s little. Its a bit tricky to Get it right, but try Google it as im not on my mac and can't guide you through the steps right now

 

[Magaman]

Your workflow is the best way of doing things. Export to compressor is buggy at best. You can't use all cores as a cluster to speed things up etc.
You can set up a virtual cluster using Qmaster and it will speed things up s little. Its a bit tricky to Get it right, but try Google it as im not on my mac and can't guide you through the steps right now

Yeah I've tried the Qmaster trick sometimes it works fine, other times I get errors.

 

[J the Ninja]

Yeah I've tried the Qmaster trick sometimes it works fine, other times I get errors.

It won't work from the Share window if any of the nodes are set for multiple instances. Supposedly, that causes Qmaster to try and launch multiple copies of FCP, which fails for some reason. (Some have said its the liscening on FCP, or it may just be some general coding idiocy in FCP.)

Also, question for more experienced people in the thread: It seems if you try to export a Quicktime reference movie of unrendered footage, FCP will pack the rendered files into the movie, instead of rendering them as usual and referencing the render files like it would if you had rendered them prior to export. Even if you told to NOT make the movie self-contained. Is this correct? Should I always be rendering everything before trying to export?