Compressor is slower than FCPX?

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Level 1

5 points

Compressor is slower than FCPX?

FInal Cut Pro X has a "share" preset called "Apple devices HD". It is h264 mpeg4 (MP4). It is pretty fast to render and good quality, but it only uses 4 of my 8 cores. I tried compressor to see if it would be twice as fast since it uses all my cores. It took like 20 times longer and didn't even look good (I used the same appdle devices HD preset). But I noticed that in compressor, the presets make a .mov or a .m4v. How can I make a preset that uses the exact same settings as the "Apple devices HD" preset from FCPX? i wanted compressor to speed things up, not to use a different process that ends up taking longer.

Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), 2006 1.1, 20GB ram, 7970, 8-core

Posted on Mar 30, 2015 12:18 PM

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Answer 1

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Mar 30, 2015 2:48 PM in response to iPadHero

Sounds like multi-pass was checked for the longer encode. Single pass enables hardware acceleration.

If you choose Apple Device HD (Best Quality) you can duplicate and rename it change settings to suit…bit rate, resolution,frame rate, entropy, etc.

BTW, both FinalCut and Compressor output the same containers, with an m4v extension.

Russ

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Answer 2

iPadHero Author

Level 1

5 points

Mar 30, 2015 8:00 PM in response to Russ H

in FCPX i use the "export file" "share" preset. The settings are set to "faster encode" (instead of "best quality"), it is 1080p 60 frames per second. It takes about 4 minutes to render a project that is 2 minutes, adn produces a .mov file that is about 560mb. The quality of this video output is great and satisfactory. During the export, only 4 out of my 8 cores are being used so i thought to try Compressor. Compressor doesnt have the same "export file" preset, so instead I choose other presets that produce a .mov file. I manually go into the settings and choose single pass, faster encoding, 1080p 60p, h264 (the FCPX uses h264 too), and manually tell it to have a datarate of about 50k (which would produce a video about 600mb). I expect it to take closer to 2 minutes to render (since 4 cores takes 4 minutes), but its not even in the ball park. I ran various tests, and i quit the compressor after about 10 minutes when its barely at about 20 percent completed. What is going on? is there no way to make a 600 mb video file of great quality for less than 3 minutes?

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Answer 3

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Mar 30, 2015 8:10 PM in response to iPadHero

iPadHero wrote:

What is going on? is there no way to make a 600 mb video file of great quality for less than 3 minutes?

If you're going to compare compression times between FCP and Compressor, at least use settings that will produce the same format.

You FCP export used Apple Device settings. I don't know what preset in Compressor, but it was obviously different.

If your objective is to engage more cores, run multiple instances of Compressor,

Russ

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Answer 4

iPadHero Author

Level 1

5 points

Mar 30, 2015 9:15 PM in response to Russ H

Compressor is using all my cores. Also, I made teh comparison as close as possible by choosing "export file" as the setting in FCPX (which renders a .mov file with h264, at 1080p60p in very good quality at about 600 mb), and in Compressor (it has no "export file" preset) i customized a preset so that in is .mov h264 1080p60p, unchecked "multipass" and set the bitrate manually to about 50k to produce a similarly sized file. it is still VERY slow compared.

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Answer 5

Apr 1, 2015 6:05 AM in response to Russ H

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