Help, compressor way too slow!

first you export your sequence THEN you send it to compressor.
Sending from FCP to compressor is a CPU hog.

 

Also, rendering your timeline is a lot different than compressing it. When you render your timeline, Final Cut is rendering all of your tracks, effects, overlays, etc. in the format you're natively editing in your sequence. It's not compressing anything.

As for compression, depending upon what format you're going for, that will likely take much longer.


As matt suggested, export as a quicktime movie (not quicktime conversion) and then import to Compressor.

 

It seems like you dont understand what rendering and compressing actually is. Rendering is used too loosely and can mean different things.

As someone already mentioned, you need to render your FCP sequence in order to create new media files the "merge" all you video and effects together into single layer reference video files. Once your sequence is rendered then you export your file and bring it into compressor.

Compressor is used to convert (sometimes still reffered to as rendering) to other files types/codecs.

FCP still does the initial render when you try and send something to compressor.

 

Compressor set up with qmaster

Try looking into setting up qmaster on your computer for at least 3 of your processors. Not hard to do. Should already be on your computer -maybe in preferences and / or Utilities. Will make a huge impact on speed.

 

Look into your Qmaster settings in your System Preferences and set up a virtual cluster for compressor so that it will use all of the processing cores.

http://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/using_compressor_with_multiple_cores.html