Long H264 Encode

I shot a long (3 day) seminar last week, straight to DVD. As a freebie, I brought my laptop and recorded firewire straight into FCP, DV-NTSC. I have about 20 hours of video this way.

I laid the video on the timeline, did some *very* basic editing, and exported non-self-contained.

I dropped the non-self-contained QT's into compressor (each between 2-3 hours long) and dropped H264 LAN and MP3 (creating a web-vid version and an MP3 version) on each and hit "go". It did the first several easily, but got stuck on one of the longer (toward 3 hours) ones at about 95% of the way through. I left it for more than a day, and the time remaining varied between 30 and 45 minutes, but it never seemed to get any closer to finishing.

I canceled and started again with another longer one. It's been rendering all night (18 hours at this point), is really close to the end, showing 30 to 45 minutes remaining, but it's been this way all morning (4 hours now).

What is the problem here, and why won't it finish?

Try MPEG Streamclip for the H.264 video and iTunes for the MP3 audio.


www.derekmok.com

Well, that was obvious.

I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes.

About 6 hours of h.264 converted since I posted this morning, have about 6 more to go. Tons faster than before. I'm perplexed, I had always used streamclip for incoming conversions, compressor for outgoing conversions (because I always use h.264), but will have to revise my workflow.

Thanks, Derek.

-MW