A rant about Compressor
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing |
My dislike of Apple’s Compressor really began with 2.0. First there were issues with really bad compression using the variable bit rates when compressing for dvd. Then there was the “unable to connect to background processes” error that began cropping up everywhere. There had always been a lengthy reinstall process to fix that one but rather than monkey around in the system I chose to use the a terminal command line entry and work around that for the last couple of years. Now we’ve got what is supposed to be this magnificently redesigned Compressor 3. Besides the fact I can’t seem to drag a setting to more than one file at a time or assign more than one destination at a time I am now getting an “Unable to submit to queue. Please restart your computer or verify your Compressor installation is correct” error every time I try to submit a batch for processing. It seems a lot of this stuff is related to Qmaster. While I would agree that being able to distribute the encodes is a great concept I would venture to guess that most people don’t use this feature. Why make it so crippling on so many machines when most people don’t use it? Make it an option to install the plumbing after the fact if you want it. Qmaster has caused me nothing but trouble since Apple introduced it many moons ago. My solution… I am switching all compression duties to Sorensen Squeeze.
Thursday, May 31st 2007 at 3:50 am
I feel your pain! Do you remember having to use Compressor 1.0 and A.Pack? Brings back nightmares. : )
Thursday, May 31st 2007 at 11:35 pm
hear hear!
If you only need to do one file I often use quicktime player’s mpeg2 export as it gives the same quality and rarely crashes.
I agree there needs to be a better way though.
Sunday, June 3rd 2007 at 4:19 am
I had the same problems and switched all of my compression tasks to TeleStream’s Episode Pro (formerly Compression Master). Stress-free life.
Monday, June 11th 2007 at 9:34 am
Apple Discussions now offers two easy ways to apply settings and destinations to multiple clips in Compressor 3, please visit http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4680141�. My *only* problem that my installation of Compressor 3 cannot submit to queue so I cannot teste all this wonderful advice.
Tuesday, June 12th 2007 at 5:42 pm
Great link George, thanks for that. With all software revisions comes a learning curve. But the fact that people are having trouble submitting means we can’t use it!! Fix it Apple.
Tuesday, June 19th 2007 at 5:26 am
Scott,
Compressor is always better than Sorenson squeeze compression in many ways. Sorenson is crap. Try out compression 3 and post your feedback. The background processor error are due to Apple QMaster settings which needs to be removed when you are going to render only in one system. Comparison with Sorenson is based on our experience and not just to support apple proapps.
Tuesday, June 19th 2007 at 6:42 am
G, thanks for that comment. I would rather use compressor than squeeze it’s just that this Qmaster stuff has plagued me since the last version. As I mentioned in the post the terminal workaround doesn’t work anymore. When I went to reinstall v.3 I couldn’t do it without a full FC Studio reinstall. If there is a way to only reinstall Compressor 3 please let me know!