Compressor is extremely slow, and I am a novice user

AFarls wrote:

I edit videos for online distribution. The can be anywhere from 5-40 mins long.

Since 2009 I have used IMovie. The video is shot and edting in HD format.

Could you fill in some more details about your online distribution?

HD can cover a variety of formats. Since you mentioned iMovie, I'm going to guess that the videos were shot with a prosumer or consumer camera, in which case the codecs are likely h.264 or AVCHD. If you created optimized media for your FCP projects, and exported Pro Res, those files will be exceptionally large.

Depending on your needs, you may be able to export to a delivery format directly from FCP – either using the HTTP Streaming preset or a video sharing preset like Vimeo's.

Compressor is not fast. But there are some things that you can do to speed it up. For HD material, Frame Controls is automatically turned on. Depending on you quality requirements, it may be acceptable to turn them off, which we speed things up considerably. Another thing that may speed up things is to actually add a step and export a Quick Time file (master) and bring that into Compressor instead of sending to Compressor. (FWIW, I find that faster.) If your computer had more than 2 cores, I'd also suggest setting up a quick cluster, but I doubt it would help with 2 cores.

But I would try a couple of tests on a short section of a project and see what effect those changes make.

Post back if any of this isn't clear.

Good luck.

Thanks for clarifying about the Web.

I was wrong about Frame Controls; they are not turned on automatically for HD material. Sorry. (All of my presets are custom with Frame Controls On and I didn't remember correctly how the stock presets work.) The Frame Reordering checkbox is something different.

Note the h.264 export default is multipass which takes 2X as long as single pass. Try a short test of single pass; I'll bet it looks good and you'll save several hours in processing time.

Good luck.

Russ

To add.. turn off Frame Reordering. Frame Reordering is only compatible with Quicktime. If you plan to distribute the video to a client or send the video to the web. This can mess things up in other video players and uses more computer processing power.

As a related aside, I have also noticed a HUGE increase in render time since updating to 4.0.6. What used to take 1-2 hours is now taking 6-8 hours. I'm about to pull my hair out. Wish there was a way to downconvert.

Well, there was a way to roll back. But unfortunately you had to take the Appleadvice before the upgrade, not after.

Russ

Well, I *do* have the old Final Cut Studio still. But right now, I'm trying a straight render out of FCP using the Share option. Doing a time test.

BTW, I should mention that this is really a sysems-specific thing. My compression times are unchanged.

Russ