FCP5 to Compressor problems

Hi;

Anyone noticed problems exporting from FCP5 to Compressor for MPEG-2 conversion? Seems to work OK if you make a quick time self-contained movie and then go to Compressor, but if you go directly from the timeline there a extremely long renders, not normal behavior. This always worked fine before FCP Studio and the transfer I'm experimenting with is only 6 min. long. I am also noticing more dissolve and fade artifacts with Studio than before on the finifshed DVDs with comparable settings. Thanks, Tom

Hey Tom,

I've been using Export Using Compressor inside FCP5 and it's been working fine, about the same amount of time needed to export an MPEG-2 as if I'd made a self-contained movie file first. Is your system upgraded from FCP4? I've heard that those work less well than systems (like the one I've been using) which started out life as FCP5 stations.

I've had precisely the opposite problem -- my home G5 with FCP4.5, Compressor 1 and DVD Studio Pro 3 can't use the Export Using Compressor function -- I have to make a QT movie first.

I have a power book g4 and i am having problems with exporting to compressor dvd mpeg-2 it seems not to be finding the source footage,although
it does preview

Just used the Compressor for first time in FCP Studio and got some awful artifacting. I bumped up GOPs to IP instead of IBBP and set at 6 but also had to insert bunch of compression markers during fast movement areas. My test sequence went well. Will try whole project today. Don't have any feel on times yet.
The latest info on the last Compressor update did not seem to address this, but I will be updating anyway ASAP.

Like Tom & Fred, I've experienced EXTREEEMELY long compression times when exporting straight from the time line, as an MPEG-2 60min High Quality Encode. My latest attempt, a 2min/40sec project, took 1hr/43min, which is totally unacceptable. To make things worse, the amount/frequency of artifacts is incredible. It's more predominant between tansitions and camera moves. The overall quality of the final clip, in my opinion, is not that good. In fact, I think in the old days, exporting an MPEG-2 as a Quicktime movie with the old Panther/FCP 4.5 was far better quality, not to mention that the average export took about 1.5x with a Two Pass VBR. It's too bad that's not even an option with FCP5.

Any suggestions? Can't seem to get a straight answer. Thanks!

My System/Software:

G5 2.5 Dual Processor
2.5 GB Ram
50 GB Available Hard Drive Space

Tiger 10.4.2
FCP Studio 5
DVD Studio Pro 4

Apple has come out with a statement on this problem, at least for those that upgraded to FCP5. It seems that the old presets for Compressor hang on during the upgrade and should not be used in the new version. I'll see if I can find the instructions on how to delete these, but it worked for me. The new preset list is different, so it is pretty easy to tell when you have the old list out and the new list in.
Here are the instructions from Apple:

Compressor 1.x settings do not work with Compressor 2
If you upgrade from Compressor 1.x to Compressor 2, the old presets from Compressor 1.x may still be available in Compressor 2 within the Custom folder in the Presets window. However, these settings do not work with Compressor 2.

Even though you can select and apply these older "inherited" settings to a job in the Compressor 2 Batch window, they will produce undesirable results. You should avoid using these settings and remove them instead. To remove them:

Quit Compressor if it's open.
Open ~/Library/Application Support/
Note: The tilde (~) refers to your Home folder. For more information, see "Mac OS X: Using Your Home Directory."
Drag the Compressor folder to the Trash.
The next time you open Compressor 2, only the new Apple optimized settings will appear in the Preset window (these are stored in a new folder at the above location). Any custom settings you create in Compressor will also be stored in this folder.
This was found at [docs.info.apple.com]

Hope that helps.
Fred

Thanks Fred, I'm going to look into this now as I came here with the same complaints as others in the SLOW export from FCP which I had heard rumors of. My six minute clip out of FCP to Compressor took FOREVER to encode. All my apps are current versions as of 9-2-05.

Now as far as RED faces, I'll continue to search here.

I have always had problems using Compressor 2.0.1 to create MPEG-2 files. Compressing at DVD: Fastest Encode 90 minutes, the batch monitor says the file was compressed successfully but ends up being an empty file on my desktop. This file crashes DVD studio pro and finder. Any suggestions?

thanks,
Catherine

I would add my hapeth here, I've had all sorts of problems with Reference movies out of FCP and absolutely no problems with Self-contained movies.

My first thought was to direct the output to a second drive. if you have one. There may be access problems, however, I'm not real confident that crashing would happen in this case. If you have time, reload both FCP and Compressor. I know you shouldn't have to, but.... Did you upgrade to FCStudio? Look at prior entries in this thread to get presets loaded right.

I'm having a lot of problems with outputting a 45 minute HD 1080i movie. I can't get it to go to the camera or to DVD. Larry Jordan says you don't need to compress HD because that's already MPEG2. Is that so? I don't know, but I'm trying to go to Quick Time movie and see if I can get something that will come out to DVD. By the way when I tried compression, it took two hours. I ended up with a cinemascope look. :-) It was like the 16:9 was stretched to 2.33:1 Funny look. Anyway, I hope somebody can solve this problem. I too have a dual processor G5 and FCP 5. I have an external hard drive and 3 Gigs Ram Memory.

I've a problem making this ... in the timeLine i try to send the video to Compressor but is impossible if you don't launch Compressor before!!! crazy...

I am having problems with FCP HD 4.5
Tiger
4 HD drives
When I try to export using compressor i keep getting and "Unable to connect to the background process"
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks

That was for MPEG-2
Renee

I've had a case of this where the problem went away if I trashed the Compressor preferences, then restarted the computer. In my case, the solution suggested by Apple (dumping Compressor updates and reloading them from the website) did not work.

Please walk me through the dumping of compressor preferences.
Thanks

In my case Compressor 2.0.1 just plain crashes, and takes along the system with it every single time, no matter if I try to output from FCP 5 or directly from it. The crash happens almost immediately after pressing "submit"
Tried the delete preferences approach.

This is a fresh install of Final Cut Studio. Upgraded to FCP 5.0.3, but it crashed before the upgrade as well.

I haven't read many reports of hard crashes, mostly quality and lenghty renders.

Any clues?


OS 10.3.9
dual 2 Ghz G5
1.25 Ghz ram
External LaCie Firewire 300 Ghz

Hi Everybody

Success at last! After 2 weeks of 14 hour days of trying every combination I could think of, I managed to output a perfect 44 minute DVD from iDVD. I didn't use compressor at all -- that is directly. I made a quick time movie self-contained and all -- that advice from Shane Ross panned out great -- then I made a DV Stream movie out of the QT movie -- which later turned out I didn't have to do: I could've gone straight to a DV Stream movie from the timeline, instead of going to a QT movie first (the end result is the same) -- then I placed the DV Stream movie in iMovie and clicked on make DVD, which opens up iDVD (I guess that's how I've set up my preferences) -- then I opened MAP in iDVD and drop the .dv file straight into the frame that tells you to drag the file into (so as to make a DVD without the Wedding Video musical intro :-)) -- then iDVD went ahead and made the 44 minute movie into a beautiful DVD. So how does this relate to compression? Well, I figure there was compression that took place because my QT movie and DV Stream movie were almost 20 GIGs each! The iDVD had to have compressed the file down to make it come out on a 4.7 GB DVD!

Okay, now I'm trying to learn the compressor and I'm following Larry Jordan's advice -- never open compressor out of FCP. This time I have a 100 minute movie. The iDVD process that I described did not work, alas! I tried compressor and MPEG 2 settings for low resolution and all, but I still can't do it, because the file although is only 4.3 MB, it ends up growing to 4.8 GB after I import it into DVD Studio, which is what I need to use as MPEG 2 isn't working in iDVD.

Compressor isn't compressing enough for me to place the movie into a 4.7 GB DVD -- which is something I drealy would like to do. Can it be done? That's my question. How can you compress a 100 minute movie to fit on a 4.7 GB DVD disc? Tell me please! Help!

I am trying to export a 45minute project to DVD studio Pro 4. When I use compressor it says its going to take 12-14hours. (I'm runnning a G4 Dual 1Ghz with 1.5Gigs of RAM). I previously exported the same project as a quicktime refrence and let DVD studio Pro do the encoding (aba 5 hours total). Is there any real difference in quality bettween the 2 methods?

- Jason

Jason (and of course everybody else).
Exporting to Compressor from FCP may be a fancy feature, but we have known since that appeared that it takes really, really longer than encoding a Quicktime movie from Compressor. Basically FCP has to render each frame and pass it to Compressor to encode. When you do that in a 2 pass encode, well, it takes a lot of time.

You just export a reference or self-contained movie from FCP and feed that to Compressor. Yes, going straight to DVD SP uses basically the same encoding technology but there are fewer options.

While we're at it, let me say this. One of the most frequent topics in this and other forums are about alternatives to Compressor. I always reply that, except for configuration problems or user mistakes, in my opinion Compressor is simply better than the alternatives. Well, this week I read Ben Wagonner (one of the world's best known compression experts) confirm my view. He says Compressor is the best, fastest MPEG-2 encoder on the Mac, period. For anybody interested, it's on Creative Cow's Compression Techniques forum. Interesting, isn't it?



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

Right so Adolfo, couldn't be put better and so glad to hear it corroborated.
It's been my own experience of Compressor too.

Adolfo, could we get a link to that?



- Justin Barham -

"Compressor 2 is definitely better than both. MegaPEG is especially weak - it doesn't even have a proper 2-pass mode. BitVice isn't bad, but can't hold up to high motion like Compressor 2, and is a lot slower to boot."


[forums.creativecow.net]



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

Nice one Adolfo. Compressor 2 is definitely underutilized.

When Apple gives us tools, and we fail to use them, who's fault is that?



- Justin Barham -

Hello, Justin.
As I said many times before, I believe many users who are disappointed with Compressor, are actually (without knowing it) disappointed with the reality of MPEG-2 compression. I completely understand it, since we as consumers were told that DVD is a top notch medium.

If your source is compressed, has a non-matching color sampling scheme (DV NTSC is 4:1:1 and MPEG-2 is 4:2:0), it's underexposed or handheld, it will look awful. And Compressor is actually among the most forgiving ones!

If you feed it 4:2:2 material (even compressed formats like PhotoJPEG or DV50), with reasonable camera motion and well exposed footage, the results are really, really good. Particularly, Compressor is very good at handling fine typography, while the others frequently destroy it. And elegant type design happens to be one of the most important areas of DVD design, right?

On the other hand, we are all educated in the plug-in paradigm: the idea that the default tools can't be very good. That's why people assume they need an alternative encoder. I have read reasonable concerns from people like Hal, who is worried about how Compressor handles target bit rates, for examples. But that's hardly representative of why regular users are frustrated.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

I spoke to a guy from apple a few days ago and asked him what is the best way to export and I mentioned the concerns and opinions of several users regarding the time and quality of "self contained movie v ref movie v export from FCP to compressor and his answer was that exporting from FCP timeline will give the best quality but yes it will take a long time as it is encoding it frame by frame. So his suggestion was to have another system for doing the job if you need to continue cutting or better still have a cluster of G5's and they will get the job done quickly. Another good point he made was that people are expecting to burn DVD's at a quality equal to the commercial DVD's available on the market that were encoded with equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and that just aint gonna happen with software costing a few hundred dollars.

Frank: IMHO, your friend spoke more as an Apple sales representative than anything else. Of course buying more computers is a good idea for Apple

But on a single (dual processor or dual core) computer, from a Quicktime movie, Compressor makes 2 pass VBR at 3x real time, which is really fast. Actually faster than most software encoders. It used to be 2x real time or faster with Compressor 1.x, but it got slower with Compressor 2. I hope it's for quality's sake, ie the encoder takes longer because it has heavier processing to do. On a bad day, the conspiracy guy in me plays with the idea that they are slowing software and rising hardware requirements on purpose to sell newer computers. But of course we know that's not possible... right?

His comment about quality is rather strange for an Apple employee, because if you feed Compressor a commercial quality source, the MPEG-2 stream can be damn close to commercial quality output. Yes, there are hardware encoders that costs a lot of money, but MPEG-2 has been around for more than a decade: nothing prevents an inexpensive software encoder by a computer giant from being quite close to those.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

Well, after all is said and done, compressor works for me too. I did a one pass VBR and managed to get the 99 minute movie down to 3.7 MB, which then worked in the DVD Studio Pro. I was able to make DVD of excellent quality in my G5. The compression time was about 3 hours. I got used to it. I went and did other things. When I came back it was done and the results were great.

Does anyone here ever go above the default 6.2bit rate on a two pass VBR?
Especially dealing with HDV content?

Also, this may be of some help:
We are now mostly shooting and post-ing on HD&HDV formats and can no longer use the MPEG-2 export from FCP timeline - i think this must be due to HDV format being MPEG-2 itself, it becomes a double negative..
An apple representative let slip that they were phasing out MPEG-2 export directly from FCP simply because Compressor 2 was overtaking it. I suspect with their HD bandwagon they are opting to veer over to this new technology.

I spoke to apple and a technician told me a sneeky way to keep the MPEG-2 export option even after installing DVD Studio 4 (this is the point where they changed to compressor-only option).
email me here if you would like the details of this:
mailto:adam@exposure4.com
I did this because with strict deadlines for projects we felt we needed the short render time (MPEG2-to MPEG2 anyone?!), and we had found the right balance of settings for standard 3-5 minute edits.

BUT...Having made DVD's from the old MPEG-2 (FCP) export, I could see that the 1080i HDV footage was not even as clear as SP content! But trying to use Compressor 2 straight from FCP timeline was condusive to crashing...

RESULT: either take out the old app support file for compressor and work from timeline, or take your time with a .mov file (self-contained), open compressor seperately, and last but not least: don't just accept the presets provided, they are loose, and generalised. take time to trial and error with different bit rates motion estimators and vbr's, depending on length and style of your project...
..AND you will be rewarded with Compressor 2. It's more stable than you might first think....

Adam Biskupski
Chief Editor
Exposure4 Ltd
www.exposure4.com

No need to field e-mails or keep it a "secret", widely know you can simply reinstall the last version of DVDSP, or just copy over the MPEG2 export plug.