Pausing Compressor 3?
 

Hi,

I'm converting a large HDV file to DV in Compressor 3 using Jim Field's fantastic tutorial: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/hdv_to_sd_dvd.html. As anticipated, the expected encode process will be long: approximately 6 hours as estimated by compressor.

3 hours through the job, I had to disconnect my computer and leave the office -- so I paused the encode in the batch monitor, quit batch monitor and compressor, unhooked my laptop from my media drives, and left.

The next day, when I reopened batch monitor and reconnected my media drives, the paused job did not show up in the batch monitor window.

Is there any way to salvage the 3 hours of work that compressor has already done and resume from where I stopped, or does compressor not acknowledge paused jobs after a restart?

When I do a search for the compressed media, I notice that batch monitor has created three files:

file.m2v
file.ac3
file.m2v.qmpause

Is this .qmpause document my secret to getting batch monitor to resume its work on my project? Double clicking on this file does nothing....

Any tips are greatly appreciated.....Many thanks!

Dave

I think that once batch monitor/Compressor is quit you cannot recover a paused job, but I have not tested this in Compressor 3 yet.

However, since you have a laptop, I would suggest simply leaving Compressor open the next time you need to pause and leave, don't shut the computer down, and then attempt to unmount the media drives.
If the drives do unmount without the "drive is in use" warning, then you should be able to close the lid (sleep), come back the next day, mount the drives, and unpause Compressor.

You will probably be successful in unmounting your media drives if you exported a quicktime reference movie to your laptop's hard drive. A QT reference movie uses the source media on the media drives, but the OS probably won't realize this and therefore allow you to unmount them.

Wow, thanks for the compliment.

I have paused projects before in compressor so I can push a more critical one up front, but I have never unhooked the drives or removed the source files and tried to restart the process.

Tim makes a good point, In Comp 3 you can close Comp 3 once it goes to batch monitor, at that point you are pulling from either the render files if you decided to do a non self contained export from FCP, or are pulling from the contained QT movie you exported. So yes you can close Comp 3 after sending to batch.

If you quit Batch, yes you will end the compression, I have had Batch re-open a project if it crashed, but at that point I worry about dropped frames, artifacts, etc so I just send it back through Comp a second time.

Best bet is to leave your laptop at work overnight, or start the export when you get home. Alot of my projects, heck all of my large projects get sent after midnight as I know I wont be doing much in the office after that on any machine. That way I wake up and they are done.

Great advice - thanks for the replies!