Compressor woes...
Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:07AM Well, I will have to keep it short today!
I can't believe I've been doing video and screencasts for over 4 years and I'm still fighting Compressor most weeks. Compressor is the application within Final Cut Studio that encodes video as the final stage before distribution. It "compresses" the huge master video files I create in FCS, usually many gigabytes in size, down to a manageable hundred megabytes or so.
Encoding is one of the most CPU intensive computing tasks and benefits from as much horsepower as you can throw at it. As an application, Compressor has lots of whistles and bells and even has distributed processing built in. This allows you to use additional machines on your network to share the encoding tasks, speeding up the process significantly.
At least, in theory that is what it's supposed to do.
It can work for a couple of weeks and then just stop working properly. The worst part is that there doesn't seem to be a known set of actions you can go through to make it start working again. I'm afraid it tends to be "waving the rubber chicken time" to get things working again.
The problem has been exacerbated recently by some really strange quirks I've been trying to work around, due to the final encoded videos being handled differently by QuickTime X and QuickTime 7. The exact same file in displayed slightly differently in each application, with the version in Quicktime X (and iTunes) being cropped by a few pixels, loosing part of the menu bar. The same file viewed in Quicktime 7 is perfect - Noooo!!!
So here I am on a Friday morning, publication day, having to try and coax six videos through the encoding process. I started early Thursday afternoon not expecting any major issues, but still haven't cracked it.
It may well be my fault in that I use the production Mac Pro as a standard desktop machine. I should really "ring fence" the machine and just use it as an editing and encoding machine.
Perhaps that's what I'll do, rebuild the Mac Pro from scratch and just install Final Cut Studio on that machine, using my MacBook Pro as my day to day machine. Perhaps I should apply some rigorous change management on the Mac Pro and keep it one build behind the latest and greatest patches and updates, backing up before an install and testing before acceptance. After all, I was a fully qualified ITIL Service Manager in my previous life!
Anyhow, I'll have to do something as this is bonkers!
Don McAllister
Following this post, @themacdaddy sent me a link on Twitter to "Compressor Repair" - A free utility that checks out a few settings on Compressor and attempts to repair them if necessary. Thanks Phillip
Reader Comments (6)
Wow and I don't even understand what your talking about..... but best of luck with the rebuild!
Don- I'm in the middle of Ripple Training's video on Compressor 3.5. Pretty slick, especially being the only "Apple Approved" video training for certification. Anyway, looking at that, and the other videos by Lynda.com and macProVideos you can tell that their machines are strictly the video powerhouses with nothing on them but the editing suite and the product the video is about. So, your probably right about the fencing in! It's hard to imagine a Mac Pro just sitting around with only one purpose in life, though. ;)
Hey Don, ITIL Service Manager - V2 I assume. I am half way through my V3 accreditation...
Nice to know that eventually there could be an escape route from ITIL - just need to find something to Podcast about LOL
John
Yes John, ITIL v2
Seems a different world away now!
Faced with similar issues back when even a high end Powermac G4 had a tough time with Final Cut Pro, I used to partition a secondary drive and installed a doodling around system for general use and kept the primary drive a very lean FCP only configuration. Boot that partition for the 6 hour editing and overnight rendering sessions, boot into the general purpose system for less intensive tasks. If you've raided all three extra drives that can be awkward, but it makes the production system more stable. I haven't done a serious performance comparison, but the less critical boot partition can even be on an external FW800 drive.
Hi Tallman 610, That sounds like a great idea! I could boot into the second partition during the editing and compressor phases and use Screen Sharing to access the MacBook Pro for email and such like whilst editing.
I've a 256GB SSD as the boot drive for the MacPro so could split this into two 128GB partitions. All my data is held externally from the boot drive anyway.
Great suggestion.