Compressor 3 is very slow for all settings

Question

I am finding Compressor 3 to be almost unusable it is so slow, on top of the awkward QMaster integration. I have been trying to encode .M2V files as well as Quicktime 7 800Kb files.
With Compressor 2 an .M2V file would take less than 2:1 to encode (less than 2 hours to encode 1 hour of footage). Now with Compressor 3 it takes 4:1 or worse. Other files such as the Quicktime 7 web codecs often take upwards of 20:1 and often the file isn't even there.
Does anyone have any suggestions regarding Compressor 3?
I recently upgraded to FCS 2.0 and have installed the most recent updates. I am using a MacBookPro 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB of Ram.

Answer 1

Hi guys,
I may not have the answer, but I can say that it does not seem normal. My biggest concern is that 20:1 using the straight QT encoder. For me that has always been the fastest way to encode. On my dual 2 G5, the QT exporter is often much less than 2:1.
As for compressor, let me tell you one thing that may be the problem. How much rendering of the video did you have to do before the export? One thing that Compressor does is re-render every frame of video.
For instance, if you have a project with a ton of graphics, scaled video, etc., and you hit render so you can see it before you export; it might take a few hours to render the whole thing. If you like it, and then export it to compressor, compressor will ignore those render files, re-render the video using a codec that matches your output (instead of DV or HDV), then export to your format. This means a couple hours of re-rendering before it actually does the export. This results in long export times, but in theory, nicer results.
To avoid this re-render, you can export a quicktime movie, manually open compressor and bring in that quicktime.
Hope that helps