HI Rusty, yeah there are some silly things with compressor. However its amongst the best kind of the tools. Just some things you might want to manage with your workflow. These have been around a while and have been reflected my many including myself.
Compressor V4.0x Preview UI.. well if you are adding 100's of jobs, best close the PREVIEW window. Why? well Compressor does its best to set up a BEFORE and AFTER (source and distribution) so you can slide around and view it. Yep with several 10's or more of jobs from "Add Files" etc, this can take ages. In one case HOURS! with some MOTION jobs added.. so in this tip. .. CLOSE THE PREVIEW WINDOW before adding JOBS. It will make a remarkable difference.
For those who might ask, well why can I also disable the ICON builds?...like you can do in MOTION for example. Dunno how to do that... maybe editiing the underwear XML... Although this doesn't consume anywhere near the time that the PREVIEW PANE does.. worth a look.
Should you need to PREVIEW your transcode then Compressor will always try and pull up a view for you as I described above. In the past I have been able to
- add a single job then
- get in quickly and adjust IN and OUT points
- then reduce the actual size of the preview
Quicktime. current flavour you have should be at least QUICKTIME X... I'd say as you're at 10.8.2 you'd be on that QT X.
If you're making many distribution formats from a SINGLE master then you should use Compressor's fabulous type of job control called JOB CHAINING... Its implemented in the Applications Jobs menu as New Job with Target Output. Basically lets you use your initial MASTER and generate one of more distributions from it and also implies soem dependancy.
Lastly you can have Compressor run your favourite Applescript to soem some specially process or two that normally requires manual interventon. One such action I use is to have one target destination folder with a FOLDER ACTION "do this when new items recived" and pass this on to Transmit.app via its API to SCP/SFTP the distibuiton to a colleague for collaboration or a cloud... There are 100's pf examples of this kind of script. You can specify an applescipts or OSASCRIPT etc to be run for a partuclar jOB also in the IMPECTOR
anyway, Compressor is your friend.. 🙂 (most of the time)
post your results for others to see.
Warwick
