Compressor won't complete 90 min 1080i to MPEG2 encode

I have a 90 minute 1080i DVCPROHD movie that I exported from my timeline as a self contained movie and when I try to encode it with compressor the same way I've done several hundred other times Compressor will take the project up to the last couple of minutes of render time, then starts going backwards....basically the time to completion starts getting longer and my activity monitor shows that the processors are 95-97% idle after running full bore for most of the encode.

I have a dual quad core Intel machine with all 8 processors set up to encode and it goes great up to the final minutes. I have about a dozen chapter markers in the program and have even tried re exporting the movies to take to compressor, but so far no luck. Trashed preferences, restarted, zapped pram...al to no avail. Also running FCS3 & have 10 gigs of ram.

I'm about ready to reinstall everything, which is no joy, but may be my only choice unless someone has an idea. Right now I'm exporting the movie to another drive to try it on my MacBook Pro. A longer process, but it will in theory tell me if my programs corrupt or it's the movies files.

Thanks for any ideas....JW

Check that your media drive isn't close to full (make sure that you have at least 85% of free space, the more the better).

One thing that takes up a lot of time when you have set up Qmaster to utilize multiple processors, is when Compressor starts to join up the different job segments into one quicktime movie. So if you go to your encoding location, you'll have parts of the movie, and a a quicktime file (or m2v file, depending on what you are doing), and the final QT movie slowly increases in size as the segments are compiled into that final QT movie. Not much you can do there.

If Compressor does get stuck, stop the encoding, hit reset background encoding in Compressor, quit compressor and go to the Finder. Hit apple shift G (go to), type "var/spool/qmaster", delete everything in there and restart the process in Compressor.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks for the info.

I tried this and after I typed in "var/spool/qmaster" received the message that "folder can't be found".

The other odd thing is that when I reset the back ground encoding the job would stop, but in a few seconds it started up again. Did this a couple of times and finally got it to stop long enough to delete it from history.

Something seems "hinky' here with compressor.

Thx...jw

Stop the encoding first. Go to batch monitor window, hit the x icon next to the job. Wait for it to stop, then reset background encoding.



www.strypesinpost.com

When I do this the encoding doesn't stop, but continues. My patience has only let me wait an hour, but it still didn't stop.