The Editblog

A while back I wrote a post called A rant about Compressor. It focused on a few specific problems with the app culminating in the dreaded “unable to connect to background processes” issue. Along came Compressor 3 and the “unable to connect” became “Unable to submit to queue. Please restart your computer or verify your Compressor installation is correct.” I became so frustrated with the long and arduous troubleshooting fix that I abandoned Compressor for Sorensen Squeeze. Upon upgrading to Leopard and the re-install of Final Cut Studio 2 on the new drive I began using Compressor 3 again. It’s relatively fast, has great integration with FCP and has a great interface. I really like it. I really want to use it. In fact I have been using it on a regular basis. Until yesterday that is. I went to submit a batch and to my horror:

Nothing listed in the Cluster pop-up. When using the host computer it should read This Computer. Hit submit and you get this:

It was working fine just a week ago. What has happened between yesterday and then? A few application installs but that’s about it. This seems to be related to Qmaster and distributed rendering. What I don’t understand is why if this is a consistent and reoccurring problem Apple can’t give the user the option of not installing Qmaster and all of it’s related components. Problem solved. I would venture to guess that most people don’t use the distributed rendering option anyway! I’ve had this very problem happen on 2 different computers under 3 different OS’s. That’s like 5 times total. Is it something I’m doing wrong? I don’t think so.

You can get a good indicator of how widespread a software problem might be by looking at support forums. A look at the Compressor forum shows it is more than just me:

That’s 835 views of the above thread. 208 below.

Oh and that last one is 2,311 views and 28 responses as of January 3, 2008 of a thread started October 2007. And that’s not counting those from Creative Cow and the LAFCPUG. There’s others out there as well.

If you think about it, there’s probably dozens of people who see the same issue for every one who looks for a solution. So there are a lot more users out there with the same problem. This was an issue in Compressor v.2 and now in version 3. We’ve had incremental updates and upgrades. Why can’t the developers fix this? Why can’t they issue a support article at least speculating on why this happens so maybe it can be avoided. Think of all the collective hours lost as users went through the manual uninstall and then sat thorough the loooooong reinstall. I know its cost me as I’ve done it 5 different times!

Frustrating. Maddening. I’ve searched the forums and articles until I am blue in the face. Rather than do the usual route of uninstall, reinstall and have it happen all over again, tomorrow I’m going to try a Frankenstein technique cobbled together from a few posts. I’ll post back on the results. If that doesn’t work I’m permanently moving to Episode Pro.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.