Q: Compressor 4 hang while encoding Blu-Ray

Hello.  I have upgraded to El Capitan.  To my knowledge, everything should now be to the latest version.  I deleted the Compressor prefs and restarted.  After a 4 hours long encode of the project for the 5th time, it is still hanging at the disc creation step.

Should I try reinstalling Compressor?  It's been a long time since I have reinstalled any software, that one of the reason I'm on Mac!    I'll have to find a procedure to do it right!

I have been made aware of the existence of another set of pref files located elsewhere, which I have deleted.  Then, deleted some leftovers from the 3.x version called "Qmaster".  I have found and trashed prefs and cache files about the "Create Disc" app/process.  No good.

I have now deleted and reinstalled Compressor, and I'm there sitting again thru another 4 hours encode, to see if it works.

Hello Russ.  I went to my job computer this morning, to find that the process was not hung, it has "successfully" finished.  However, the .img file was nowhere to be found.  I tried to "reuse" the project and got an error message about some Qmaster stuff missing.  I had deleted the Qmaster files, as an Apple article was suggesting.

I quit and relaunched the app, and it is again hanging at 50% progress.  Every time I stop the hung Compressor, I have to go and force quit the Create Disc process, which can't be good!!

About the background, I'm using the stock blue menu in Compressor, but using the Logo function to add a 1113 X 916 PNG file with transparency.  It has worked nicely  in the past.  Even if I had a larger background pic, it would be a bug, not an user error, imho! 

Now, the only thing I have not changed is my custom Blu-ray destination template, whose file I have preserved when deleting the prefs and which have worked in the past.

Yes, I searched for the .img file.  According to the Compressor Prefs, it should have saved at the same place as the Source file, which was on the Desktop.

I got the latest Onyx for El Capitan, ran thru all the maintenance and cleaning options, re-deleted all Compressor prefs, and have restarted yet a new encode.  Will be back in 4-5 hours!

Next step would be to try a built-in template instead of my own customized one.  But I'm still puzzled that this same setup had worked mostly fine for the last year or so and began to give me trouble in the past 2 weeks with nothing new in or around the computer!

Nope, another failure.  In the meantime, I was looking at the running process in Activity monitor, and I noticed a few processes with name related to the infamous Qmaster, which an Apple information page had me remove them previously.  This software bit is related to distributed processing of jobs over other computers, which I do not use.  Seeing as the process always halt at the 50% progress point, I'm wondering if somehow my computer is not waiting for another imaginary computer to send its  "rendered" part of the data, to put back into the main project?

I ran an utility called Compressor Repair, by Digital Rebellion, that did not cure the issue.  I deleted some cache file in the cache folder in Library.  Not much better!

I then decided to pursue testing with a 29 seconds file, instead of my 1h20m one, to drastically shorten the process time.  I used the built-in Blu-Ray setting instead of my tweaked one.  THEN it worked!  Next, I tried back another, different video file, and it worked too.  The weird part : I re-used my custom setting template, and it ALSO worked!  So it looks like some gremlin had to be dislodged in the process queue or cache, then the normal behavior would resume.

Happy to have unblocked the system, I started another encode with my long video file, called it a day, and went home.  This morning, Compressor was hung at 50% again.  I'm so tired of this mess...

Actually, the audio (ac3) and video (264) files are outputing fine, it's the Job Action "Create Blu-Ray" that halts at 50%.

My original file is a good old .mov in Apple Pro-res 4.2.2, nothing special there. But I could try to use other long files, which I'll have to do some day anyway, to see if those encodes OK.

I have created a test user and I'm trying the job in that account.  Will repport in 5 hours! 

Nothing but the length.  I always export my projects from FCP-X as Master Files in Pro-res, then use them as needed to create DVDs (in iDVD), Blu-Rays (in Compressor) or mp4/m4v files (in QuickTime player), and to archive them on hard-drives.

Thanks for your time Russ!

Encoding in another account failed.  I'm gonna try smaller video projects, since I have several other to do!