Render Settings
 

I have a 105 minute nested sequence (FCP 6.0.6) I'm trying to render out to upload to a server and I need it to be relatively small (1 gig or a little bigger would be fine). I tried using compressor and after 7 hours of it saying "compressor processing", and then noticing that when I looked at the activity monitor it says "not responding" I canceled it. I use a Mac Pro Dual-Core 2.66 with 16 GB of ram.

My project and footage is 1440 x 1080 (HDV, ProRes442) so I obviously want to maintain the HD or 16:9 aspect ratio with the render. I keep trying different options in quicktime conversion but every time I do it the aspect ratio is all wrong. What's a good setting to use for what I'm trying to do? I'd like to use quicktime this time vs compressor.

update:
I'm trying a 640 x 360 H.264 render right now using quicktime conversion so well see how this works, but any tips are appreciated.

Best tip I could possibly offer is to get hold of a Elgato Turbo 264 HD, or if you can afford it, a Matrox Compress HD (or one of their MXO2 series I/O devices with built in "MAX" hardware) ... these are H264 accelerators and will take away a good deal of the pain you are currently suffering.

Other than that your MacPro system actually has 2 dual core 2.66 GHz processors if I'm not mistaken ... so that gives Compressor four cores available for processing tasks. If you set up a virtual cluster on your Mac then you can help Compressor to help itself by splitting up the compression task and assigning separate parts to each available core so as to take advantage of the full processing power that your workstation can offer. Jon Chapel offers an easy to follow guide for setting this up here > Using Compressor with multiple cores - Digital Rebellion Blog ... note that he advises using only half available cores as per Apple's own guidelines but that many folks have found there are significant gains to be had by using all cores, not just half, or all minus one to maximize performance. Try for yourself.

Best
Andy

By my best math, your criteria of 1GB for 105 minutes of footage equates to a bitrate of about 1 megabit per second.

That ISN'T very much. At all.

ADDENDUM: I JUST noticed you are now considering smaller than HD image sizes. This WILL help. 1mbps is PASSABLE with some care given...

Thanks for the feedback guys. The 640 x 360 H.264 render I did worked out well and was around 700mbs. I also used compressor repair - Compressor Repair - Repairs broken Compressor / Qmaster - to fix the "not responding" problem.

Andy, I will check out "Using Compressor with multiple cores" for sure, looks very interesting, thanks.