Compressor 4 so slow...

Hi :-)
Compressor 4 seems to be very slow, it only takes 6 - 9 percent of my computers processing power, according to activity monitor. Is there some sense in it which I don´t get?
thanks

Thanks. I keep forgetting Qmaster is run out of System Preferences. Sorry to be so dumb about the general concept, though: I don't have other CPUs avail for clustering, so I guess none of this will help me anyways.
The thing that I don't get is that I'm reading about how fast these new versions are, but if I add a few effects to my work, it basically becomes unusable. Relatively short*,fully-rendered projects (using 1920x1080 Apple Intermediate Codec files) and a few effects choke Compressor whether addressed directly or through "Export using Compressor settings...". The compression starts off OK, but when I check in a bit later I see I should expect thirty, fifty hours for the job to complete. I am running a 2.93 GHz iMac I7 (iMac11,3) with 16Gb RAM, so this is dissappointing at best.
*Under 30 minutes, often waaay under.

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Compressor 2 Slow....

Ooops... Posted this in the DVD Studio Pro discussion, got no response... now I know why. LOL
Hey All,
I don't know if this has been addressed here already... so forgive me if I'm repeating something....
Is it just me or is Compressor 2 slower than 1.xx? I'm compressing the same type of content at a much slower rate than I was able to with previous versions of Compressor.
I have recently upgraded to DVDSP 4 from ver. 2. It really seems that the new compressor takes much longer to compress the same material. Am I missing something here?
Thanks!

Thanks Mikey!
I'll check out the Optibase.
Man... It really is slow. 15 hours to encode what used to take me 5. Same content, same length of video, same VBR 2 Pass Settings.... and according to what I've read here, I'm not the only one.
Real bummer... Hopefully Apple will address the issue at some point. I'm going to install Compressor 1 on another machine and use that in the interim
Again, thanks for your help.
Cheers!
G5 Dual 1.8 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Why is Compressor way slower on 1 Mac Pro

This is about Compressor 3.5.3 but it's not really about the version.
I have two identical MacPros 2,1 models both running OSX 10.6.8 and Final Cut 7.0.3 and Compressor 3.5.3.
The only difference in the machine is one has 20 gigs of ram and the other has 24 gigs.
I'm capturing BetaSP tape, 30 min loads, and then converting it to ProRes LT with Compressor. Same settings in both instances of Compressor.
I load 12 captures into one machine's Compressor and hit submit. It finishes in a little over two hours.
I load only 5 captures into the other machine's Compressor and hit submit. It finished in over 5 hours.
They are both 8-core machines with the same processors and are identical otherwise. I can't believe that 4 more gigs of ram would make that much difference.
Also they are sourcing off identical raids as well and writing back to identical raids. Why is one machine so majorly SLOW!

Hi
How much free space is there on the Main Hard Disks ?
• Exactly the same ?
• one is 5Gb or less the other 100Gb or more
I never go less than 25Gb for work with interlaced SD-Video Quality
think that about 4-5 times more will work OK for full quality HD progressive - may be ?
What Processes are running in back ground ?
• Time Machine
• File Vault
• Internet
others
NON on my Video Mac
else things that matters reg. speed and performance (for iMovie/iDVD - but are really general)
TO GET IT TO WORK SLIGHTLY FASTER
• Minimum of 25Gb free space on Start-Up hard disk
• No other programs running in BackGround e.g. Energy-Saver
• Don’t let HD spin down or be turned off (in Energy-Save)
• Move external/secondary hard disks that are not to be used to Trash - To be disconnected/turned off
• Goto Spotlight and set the rest of them under Integrity (not to be scanned)
• Set screen-saver to a folder without any photo - then make an active corner (up right for me) and set
pointer to this - turns on screen saver - to show that it has nothing to show
• No File Vault on - Important
• NO - TimeMachine - during iMovie/iDVD work either ! IMPORTANT
• Lot's of icons on DeskTop/Finder also slows down the Mac noticeably
• Start a new User-Account and log into this and iMovie get's faster too - if a project is in a hurry
• And let Mac run on Mains - not just on battery
Yours Bengt W

Compressor is slow on Macbook Pro

Is anyone else noticing that compressor runs very slow on the macbook pros. We are using it to compress 22 minute standard def video files to quicktime 7>300k. The compressions run about twice as fast on a G5 comparred to a mac book pro.
I was reading this article and the testers seemed to have the same findings.
http://creativemac.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=43717
Has anyone found out why compressor is so slow on macbook pros and/or how to fix it?
Thanks!
Dan

Laptops have fundamentally worse performance than desktops with smiilar specs. This is true on customs, Macs, Dells, HP, alienware, etc. I try not to use my laptop to do anythign demanding because I know I'll be waiting a while. As far as a technical reason, it may be best to keep trying with Apple support. Although I'm sure its similar, I only knos the technical reasons for PCs.

Compressor interface slow to repsond

Hi,
I have just installed FCS and I am using Compressor 3.5.3 to convert some footage into Apple ProRes format ready for use with Final Cut Pro.
When I drag a clip into the project window, it appears immediately. However, when I click on the clip to select it there is a delay of up to 2 seconds before it becomes active (highlighted blue). Also, when I drag a setting or destination onto the clip there is a similar delay.
I am new to Compressor and I was wondering if this is normal? All other Pro Apps seem to respond much quicker.
I have tried trashing the preference files, but it makes no difference. CPU usage is approximately 40% whilst waiting for clips to become active or for settings to be applied. If you require any further information, please do not hesitate to ask.
Thanks in advance,
Acros-Krik

Has anyone found a solution to this? I'm running a new 12 core, 6 gig RAM, eSata drives.
The actual Transcoding flys. With a virtual cluster I'm running through files faster than I ever thought possible in compressor.
But wait... It takes hours just to set up batches to get to this point. All sources are ProRes. Adding 1 file, applying setting and destination takes no time. Adding 50 sources, well, that's another story.
Adding 300 takes an hour just to get to a point where I can hit the submit button. Making a droplet is even slower.
The real problem is that I have 1400 files on this drive alone. 10,000 clips to transcode by March 1st.
Can't someone just come up with an ffmpeg patch that allows it to handle ProRes.

Compressor too slow

hello I'm using compressor 4.1.3 and its too slow when i even encoding 17 sec video file and its using all cpu also encoding with 17 sec video takes 55 min thats too long , what can i do for make it faster ... by the way I'm using yosemite

Agree that 55 minutes for a 17 second video is too slow…it's actually ridiculously slow. Compressor is not the speediest of compression apps, but it's better than that.
So something is wrong.
Describe your system configuration. And your workflow…what kind of files are your source files and are you adding stand-alone files or are you sending projects from Final Cut or Motion? Finally, what purpose are you compressing these files?
Russ

Compressor 5x Slower than past

I have been editing some lectures in SD for a couple of years, and sending to Compressor for H264 iPad, iPhone. Support slides, videos are edited in, shapes used to highlight different items. Encode times for 40-50 minute program range 5 to 6 hours. Got one going now that is over 19 hours in and almost 7 hours remaining. No setting changes made, so I wonder if anyone has any suggestions regarding source of the slowness. Mac Pro Quad Core OS 10.5.8.
Thanks in advance for any clues.

Thanks for your response, Micheal. In looking around for a solution I did see several posters suggesting exporting a .mov first, then importing that into Compressor. I have always gone from the FCP timeline, and always been able to get away with letting it encode overnight to find successful completion the next morning. Yesterday I learned that there are clear advantages to exporting QT first so will start doing that.
I need to find a simple fools guide to setting up a render cluster for just the one Mac Pro.
Use Disk Warrior regularly. Drives have at least 25% free capacity, thanks for mentioning that.
I did use Disk Utility to repair permissions - there were several that needed it. Also 'Reset Background Processing' in Compressor, and downloaded and ran the free utlilty Compressor Repair. As a result, encoding the same lecture for DVD at best quality 90-minute took a much more normal 5 hours and 43 minutes.
Glad not to be looking at possible drive failure, even though I do keep drives backed up.
Once again, thanks for your suggestions. Much appreciated.

Compressor 3 slower than Compressor 2?

Both myself and an editor I work with have found that Compressor 3 is 40% to 50% slower than Compressor 2.
As an example, I encoded a large (640x360) anamorphic H.264 from a DV film in Compressor 2, and it took a little less than 40 minutes. In Compressor 3, using the same DV film and the same preset, the encode took 56 minutes.
Both myself and the editor I mentioned before are using G5 based machines. Is that the issue?

Well, I have heard this lament before with the G5s, and all I can say is that I guess Apple is slowly starting to drop support for the PowerPC generation (it was inevitable). I assume you've upgraded to 3.0.1?
As for Motion 3 (and someone correct me here if I am wrong), I believe it's slower because of the full 3D integration. Whether or not you have a lot of 3D aspects, I think it still calculates for it, causing your response and render time to decrease.

Help - New Machine But Compressor Seems Slow

I just upgraded my main edit box from an old dual-G5 to a new 2x2.26 Quad-Core Xeon.
I'm doing some encoding tests and things seem a little slow to me.
I've got a QT movie with a duration of 7:42. It's a 1920x1080 ProRes 422 file at 29.97fps. I dropped this file into Compressor and dropped a simple h264 Quicktime setting onto it (based on the H.264 preset). When I submit the job, the job starts out with something like "4:00 remaining" in Batch Monitor. This number then steadily climbs until at about 25 percent complete it shows 17:00 time remaining with 5:21 elapsed.
During this whole process Activity Monitor shows the Compressor process only using about 4-5% of CPU with 47 threads. Why isn't it using the rest of my CPU? Why is it taking so long to compress?

Welcome to the Boards Could be a few things, such as how your discs are configured (i.e., reading/writing to same drive, etc.) Have you set up virtual clusters via QMaster? That can really help alot with encode times. Also encoding can take a bit of time from 1920 x 1080 to H.264 and the times can change and vary from the final number.

Long rendertimes with FCPX/Compressor, much slower than ffmpeg

I got my first HD only project and wanted to export my 1h timeline to a 1080p H264 file. I used the "Apple Devices 1080p" Settings from Compressor.
It took more than 24h to render the project
In comparsion I exported a ProRes Master from FCPX and used the latest ffmpeg encoder with similar H264 settings:
It took just about 2h to render the project
Qualitiy is about the same, maybe slighty better for FCPX but definetly not worth the slow render process. I conclude from this that FCPX (at least for H264) is far from being optimised and I am not sure whether the GPU (a Radeon 7870) is actually used. CPU load on my 8 cores was always only 60-70% while with ffmpeg all cores worked at 100%
Is there anything to optimise (other than the usual "get more power/RAM" hints) or is this simply normal: a day rendertime for a 1h HD (1080) project?

Russ H wrote:
What Ben said…FCPX exports do take advantage of the GPU.
Do you know any way to check this? There is a tool called "atMonitor" which gives some information about GPU load but its always 0% on my Mac..
2. Do an undo to bring back the render bars. Now export the unrendered sequence as a Pro Res Master file.
Is this actually possible? I though when pressing Apple-E any pending rendering is done before export..?
On my 3 year old iMac, I would expect a single pass encode from Pro Res to h.264 to be between 2X and 2.5X real time, using Compressor. Choosing multi pass settings would double that. And scaling would extend it quite a lot further.
Thanks for your estimate. That gives me an idea that something must be wrong with my settings. A factor of 2-3 seems reasonable and comparable to other tools like MPEG Streamclip or Handbrake.
Maybe the "1080p 10Mb/sec" Preset is an overkill and I should use lower bitrates. I will try your "experiment" because so far I was just looking at the last step: ProRes -> H264.
Thanks, Emilia

Why is Compressor so Slow?

I love Apple software, and Compressor is no exception. For converting and compressing video, there isn't a tool out there that surpasses it. However, there is one major complaint that I have. While the rendering process of the video itself is relatively quick, the process of setting up an encode is grueling.
The other day, I took a video file (it was .mkv) and imported it into Compressor with the intention of formatting it properly for my Apple TV. However, importing the video file itself took almost 3 hours. I thought the program had frozen, but I left it going just to see if it would recover. The next step was to take a preset and drag it into the project file for the conversion. This took another hour. Hitting the "Submit" button to start the conversion took 30 minutes.
The conversion process itself was relatively quick, and finished in under 2 hours (not bad for a 3 hour 1080p movie).
I love how this software works, and I love how easy it is to use. But the process of starting a conversion or compression should NOT take most of a day. I understand if the rendering process itself takes hours, but it seems silly that setting up a project takes that long.
Is this a bug, or is this normal?
Or perhaps it is simply the .mkv file format there is a problem with? When I am sending footage directly from Final Cut Pro X, there seems to be almost no delay, even when the video project I am working on is over two hours (also 1080p). Either way, I am using the freeware "Handbrake" for my Apple TV conversions, which seems silly since I have a perfectly functional Compressor program at my disposal.
Thank you for listening!
-David
P.S. If it mattered, here are my system specs:
Early 2011 MacBook Pro
2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB DDR3 RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB Graphics

Not saying that Compressor is speedy, but for most audio and video formats, it's just drag and drop and Compressor will open them. But…MKV isn't one of those formats. I understand that he newest (beta) version of MPEG Streamclip supports MKV. You can export it to something that is Compressor-friendly.
Good luck.
Russ

Compressor very slow - DETAILS AND SETTING INSIDE

Hello,
Compressor is working very slowly. I am sending sequences from FCP to compressor. I just want a small, low quality version to upload to youtube (as a preview for my client) and compressor is taking up to 2 hours to compress a 6 min. long movie. I'm using the following settings:
Name: YT FSP
Description: H.264 video at 8 Mbps with AAC 44.1kHz audio
File Extension: mov
Estimated size: unknown
Audio Encoder
AAC, Stereo (L R), 44.100 kHz
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 640
Height: 480
Pixel aspect ratio: 0.75
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: (100% of source)
Selected: 29.97
Frame Controls On:
Retiming: (Fast) Nearest Frame
Resize Filter: Linear Filter
Deinterlace Filter: Best (Motion Compensated)
Adaptive Details: On
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Progressive
Codec Type: H.264
Multi-pass: On, frame reorder: On
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 50
Min. Spatial quality: 25
Key frame interval: 24
Temporal quality: 50
Min. temporal quality: 25
Any help's appreciated. Thanks!
-Jon

What type of file is the source media? What resolution? If it's HD 1280x720, for example, or if it's already been encoded as one format (MP4, H.264, etc), you're asking Compressor to shrink the file and re-encode, which can take time.
Also, if you have an older machine with 2 or less processors, they can heat up very quickly in which case it can take a VERY long time to compress. If your computer is super hot, I'd suggest trying to get a fan or place it on an AC vent - something to help cool it down to speed rendering.

Compressor suddenly slow

I am using DVDsp vers.3 on a G5 dual 2.0Ghz processor with 2.5GB ram.
I use the "build in background" preference when I import a 45 minute Qt video file (16:9 anamomorphic)for encoding. I have used this basic method for several years but all of a sudden the process is very slow, taking 4 hrs or longer to encode the 45 min.video before ever beginning the muxing process. The Mac console lists a "CGContextSaveGState2" problem but I don't know if this is related to sudden slow down. Does anyone have an idea what would cause the slow down?

Nick, thank you, good idea to keep things clean. apps in the final cut studio often seem to benefit from trashing prefs, too.

Quicktime export (fast) vs Compressor export (slow)

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?

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)

Compressor VERY SLOW

I have just updated to FCP 5 and Compressor 2. Did all the updates. My Problem is when exporting out of FCP5 to do just a "60 min. Fastest Encode 4:3" takes 8 hours???? This I NEVER remembered about Compressor 1. Even in DVDSP3 when I bring the same file, but just exported out of FCP5 in a Quicktime DV format it encodes a LOT faster. I know compressor does a better job at encoding but it should still not take 8 hours....should it? Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

Robert said:
2 hours to encode a 13 minute FCP sequence is too long.
That does seem too long. I'd estimate that on your Power Mac G5 something a little under one hour would probably be more consistent for a 13 minute sequence in standard definition, 2-pass best quality. However, I don't think that you are seeing the extreme results that some are reporting (10x slowdowns). What preset did you use and are you sure that the timeline was completely rendered before you started the export?
As a point of comparison, my 800MHz G4 system would take about 3.5 hours to compress 13 minutes of DV when using Compressor 2's best quality 2-pass preset. However, if I use one of the "faster" presets (1-pass or even CBR) I could encode that 13 minute sequence in about one half hour. The times I'm quoting for my system are what I'd consider to be typical for Compressor 2 and thus they do not represent the extreme results (or apparent malfunctions) that some are reporting.
I'll admit, however, that under Compressor v1.x and with QuickTime 6 that a similar 13 minute sequence would probably take no more than 2.5 hours to complete on my 800MHz G4 when using a 2-pass high quality preset.
As far as exporting to a QuickTime movie, I doubt that you'd experience any noticeable quality difference as long as you exported as a QuickTime _Movie_ using __Current Settings__ and with _all_ markers. In fact, if you export as a reference movie (_not_ self-contained) then Compressor will reference your original FCP source files and I doubt that there would be any quality difference whatsoever.

Render Benchmarks: GPU vs Quicktime X vs Compressor Quick Clusters vs Compressor distributed

I've been using Final Cut since the early days when Apple acquired the original technology and began bundling apps to create Final Cut Studio, Along the way, I have used Compressor and now have the latest version installed. I don't use Compressor much because I've always felt the performance and interface lagged behind third-party apps and now FCPX's GPU rendering.
I've been producing wedding videos for a while. Due to the long form nature of the ceremonies and the various formats I provide (web/h264, DVD, Blu-ray), I'm even more eager to optimize my rendering times.
I have tried setting up QMaster clusters multiple times over the years but found they were characteristically unreliable and didn't want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting and nursing them. With the addition of quick clusters in Compressor, I decided to give it a go again this past week.
I have 3 Macs on a gigabit LAN: 2008 Mac Pro 2.8 (8 threads), 2011 iMac i7 3.4 (8 threads), 2011 Mac Mini i5 (4 threads). All have the same/latest version of ML, FCPX and Compressor. The Mac Pro is my primary workstation: 24GB RAM, SSD boot drive, RAID0 Media drive for Projects and Events, ATI 5770 GPU.
I have a 50 min 1080 30p timeline with some mullticam clips, titles multiple audio tracks, CC, NR, etc. After allowing FCPX to background render the entire Timeline (original media/high quality playback), I choose the Share button and send a 3 min segment to a PR422 1080 30p Master destination.
From FCPX shared to PR422 Master: 1:09
Then the same segment:
From FCPX timeline shared to the default Compressor 1080p Apple Devices (10Mb) destination (not opening Compressor): 14:52
From FCPX timeline shared to Apple Devices 1080p Best Quality destination: 9:21
From Finder using the 3Min PR422 Master Segment file and the "Encode Selected Files" Service at 1080p: 3:50
From Quicktime X using the 3min PR422 Master segment file and 1080p Output format: 3:46
From Quicktime 7 Pro using the 3min PR422 Master segment file and 1080p Output format: 10:44
From Compressor using Apple Devices 1080p (10Mbps): 7:19
Adobe Media Encoder CS6 using the 3Min PR422 Master segment file w/H264 2Pass VBR 10Target/12Max m192Kb Audio 1080 30p: 6:54
This segment was too short to get a reliable test using Compressor with my "This Computer+" distributed rendering but my tests showed that even with all available threads, the distributed rendering is much slower than GPU rendering or QTX encoding. I have included screen composites here of the various output files, settings, CPU loads and utilized threads: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6tgamkjs5z2r6zv/Zg6zcyn3Ya
I realize this IS NOT scientific in that most of the tests have small variations in compression bit rates and 32 vs 64bit processes. Regardless, I'm confident that for most circumstances, Compressor is slower than most other workflows. I couldn't find a situation where I would want to use it.
Fastest hands-on workflow: Output a Master PR file then right click the file in Finder and encode to 1080p, about 5min total.
As a side note: Despite setting the quick clusters up by the book, I could never get the nodes to start rendering. Interesting because I had no problems with "This Computer+" using the available nodes on my LAN.
Observations? Recommendations?

Compressor 4 so slow...

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