I have an 8 minute ProRes file at 1920 x 1080. It takes about 20 minutes on my machine If I export this as a full res 1080p H264 file (10 Mbps) using Quicktime 10.1. Why does it take 2 hours, with the same setting using Compressor 3.5.3?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5), 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM
What are these settings?
Best if you can post screen shots.
Russ
Quicktime X and Compressor 3.5 uses the same codec which is 32 bit. Compressor will be faster if you setup a Quick Cluster in the Qmaster perfs.
This didn't help at all. Rendering times are still 5 times longer than when using Quicktime export. A simple 3 minute video can easily take 1,5 hour to export in compressor, where it takes about 10 minutes to export using quicktime X.
Any suggestions?
In my experience QT is usually faster even with Qmaster running well. That doesn't always mean better and there are way more controls in Compressor.
Without being able to see what all the tabs are set to in Compressor there is no panacea answer.
Do you have frame controls turned on to best?
Are you doing single pass in QT vs 2 pass in Compressor?
I'm not sure what settings Quicktime uses, they're preset. I will try to figure out what the preset settings are.
If you open your PR file in QT and do export/movie to quicktime movie and click options/you will see the movie settings window and you can change numerous things in regards to codec, size, data rate, audio, etc. You can also see what the default is and then try and match that in Compressor to get a more accurate apples to apples comparison.
There are very similar settings in Compressor when you click on the encoder tab in the inspector window for the setting. If frame controls(tab is same name next to encoder) are on and set to best your render times will increase greatly.
I don't understand what you're referring to. I'm using the export feature of Quicktime X. To my knowledge is doesn't provide any export options, just presets.
Something is seriously wrong if a Compressor job takes 1.5 hours to encode 3 minutes. That's why a screenshot of yours ettings would be helpful.
Russ
Name: H264 1920 x 1080 @ 10Mbps
Description: H.264 video with stereo AAC audio. Settings based off the source resolution and frame-rate.
File Extension: mov
Estimated size: 4.61 GB/hour of source
Audio Encoder
AAC, Stereo (L R), 48,000 kHz
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 1920
Height: 1080
Pixel aspect ratio: Square
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: (100% of source)
Frame Controls: Automatically selected: Off
Codec Type: H.264
Multi-pass: On, frame reorder: On
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 75
Min. Spatial quality: 25
Temporal quality: 50
Min. temporal quality: 25
Average data rate: 10.24 (Mbps)
Some of Compressor's presets are single pass and some are double pass. Jobs that use double pass will take twice as long. The choice can be made in the inspector.
In addition to a screenshot of the setting (s) you refer to in your first post it would also be helpful to know something about your system…what yours system specs are.
And FWIW – as Darbypsnm mentioned, faster is not necessarily better. The main "selling point" of Compressor has never been that it's the fastest encoder. Rather it can do a wide range of things (like changing standards, motion-compensated de-interlacing, image sequences, and more) and controls that can minimize artifacts when down-converting HD material. Another very good app, MPEG Streamclip, is noticeably faster than Compressor, but while I use it often, I don't think it delivers quite the quality that Compressor…so for critical projects I use the slower software.
Russ
Apologies, I overlooked the 10 reference in the first post.
What is this file being used for?
Where will it playback?
Hi Russ,
I'm not talking about the presets in Compressor, but the presets in Quicktime X. I understand that double will take longer than single. My system is mentioned under my post.
I am very happy with the QT X exports, so I am merely trying to figure out what settings to use in Compressor to get the same results, both in quality as well as in export duration. The quality of a 3 minute export in Compressor (after 1,5 hours of rendering) is not any different in quality to the export from QT X which only took 10 minutes. So I'm wondering what's going on?
kahara wrote:
So I'm wondering what's going on?
I am wondering as much.
By way of comparison an h.264 encode (with your screenshot's settings) of a 3 1/4 minute clip took my not-so-speedy 4 year old iMac 16 minutes. That was with multipass selected and without submitting to my Quick Cluster. (If I had used single pass, I would expect that it would have taken 8 minutes. For such a short clip, I'm not sure whether using clusters would have sped it up much. But if I have a moment later today, I'll test it.)
Russ
FYI, here's an update on that test..
I did the same encoding job, but with single pass, and submitting to Clusters. It took 5 minutes, ± a couple seconds.
Using Clusters had a bigger impact than I had thought it would on this short file (David's probably nodding). I anticipated 8 minutes single pass without using Clusters, so it appears Clusters produced nearly a 40% time savings. Not bad.
Russ
Quicktime export (fast) vs Compressor export (slow)
