FCP Compressor

I have been using FCP 4.5 HD on OS X 10.3.9 for a while and have always converted projects to MPEG-2 with no problem. Ever since I upgraded Quicktime to 7.o.4 Pro, that function is no longer available where it used to be. Now Apple wants me to go to Compressor to do this, but every time I go there, I get the spinning color ball for about 5 minutes, then back to where I was. I cannot access Compressor. Any ideas?

Welcome to the Compressor Fan Club.

It is highly recommended that you export your show as a stand-alone QuickTime and use Compressor as a separate program instead of an export module from Final Cut. If you don't do that, it could take you weeks to produce a DVD.

It does sound like you're runing out of disk room. Do an INFO on all your drives and make sure you have at least 10% free space on each one including the System Drive.

There are a number of problems with people running QT 7 with older packages. You may need to download and install QT again.

[docs.info.apple.com]

I think I hit them all.

Koz

Koz:
Thanks for that. That is the way I would normally do it, but I found Studio Pro crashed often enough on me that I thought I would relieve it of its compression by doing it before i sent the QT Movie into the Studio Pro program. I know it's an ass-backward way of doing it but i could not understand why Studio Pro kept crashing. I sometimes had to re-start four or five times before Studio Pro actually burned the DVD. Oh well, that show biz I guess.

<<< why Studio Pro kept crashing. I sometimes had to re-start four or five times before Studio Pro actually burned the DVD.>>>

Do you get any messages or Spinning Beach Balls Of Death?

You know that's not normal, right?

When people don't come back to me with the actual capacity of their drives, I know they didn't look and that's probably the trouble.

Koz

Actually, when it crashed, the screen turns gray and a wierd black box with a Quicktime logo appears. Inside the box, in five different languages, it reads something to the effect of "You must restart your machine". I will check all drives and make sure I have at least 10% remaining. That is an excellent suggestion and one I probably should have thought of. (After I checked) My startup drive is a 120GB and I have 27 GB of free space. All other drives are 200GB or more and all have at least 10% free space.

<<<the screen turns gray and a wierd black box with a Quicktime logo appears>>>

Yes, that's an actual system crash when the machine can't find enough room to do its work. The 10% space thing is a minimum. Several humans on this forum advocate much larger numbers for speed and good stability.

If you export your Final Cut show as a stand-alone movie, is there room anyplace for that single file? When Compressor works--no matter how you launch it--it needs to keep the show up in the air multiple times to make 2-pass compression. If it can't do that anywhere on the machine, it will throw its little hands up and surrender.

<<<All other drives are 200GB or more and all have at least 10% free space.>>>

I'm almost afraid to find out how many other drives you have. You can get into serous trouble with multiple daisy-chained FireWire drives. How much internal memory do you have? Much less than 2G of hardware memory can lead to instabilities on a video machine.


I'm not going to second guess your installation, but I would be seriously cleaning house. Cast off the full FireWire drives and put the self-contained show on a new, empty drive. OSX-Extended format, no Journalling. Clean out the System drive so the self-contained show will fit on it at least once--if possible.

I'll bet serious chocolate all the instability and crashing problems go away.

A number of people got burned when they smashed their machine full of clips and sequences and captures on multiple drives and then found to their horror they couldn't get the finished show out.

Koz