After months of procrastinating we finally tried distributed encoding in Compressor and it was embarrassingly simple and very cool. Normal encode time of 20+ minutes went down to 6+ minutes with 2 machines and then 3.5 minutes on 3 machines(all 8-Core MacPro).

However today during a distributed processing job (putting discrete video file into Compressor, not from FCP) machine#3 is editing HDV in Final Cut, then starts dropping frames, then crashes altogether.

Anyone else have this issue? Thanks

What model of computer is it?

HDV is very processor intensive so perhaps that computer should be taken of the distribution network while it's working in that codec. Converting to ProRes gives you better quality but it's a lot less processor intensive, unfortunately the files are 3 to 4 times as large.

Thanks for responding. The model as I said is 8-core MacPro, all three. We edit HDV on all three machines and render in ProRes to get the best of both worlds. I realize HDV is relatively processor intensive but with these machines that's never been an issue, so far at least.

Have you had this issue?