Why is exporting from Compressor of FCPX is beyond slow

[Asianpork]

Anybody have any ideas on why compressor is so ungodly slow at exporting a 2:17min long movie to Vimeo?

I made a time-lapse movie in 4K in FCPx and sent it to compressor to publish to Vimeo and at 1 hour and 5 min mark it has only finished about 2/3rd of the way. Why is it taking so long?

Same with FCPX. I tried sharing the video from within FCPX and it's just stuck at 37%. It move up 1% every 20mins or so.

I'm using the top spec 2017 iMac with 40Gig RAM so I don't think specs are my issue. What is going on? Any help is appreciated since I'm fairly new to FCPX and completely new to Compressor.

 

[joema2]

Anybody have any ideas on why compressor is so ungodly slow at exporting a 2:17min long movie to Vimeo?...time-lapse movie in 4K...

Try exporting directly from FCPX to a file, then upload that file to Vimeo. Use these export options:

File>Share>Master File>Settings
Format: Computer
Video Codec: H.264 Faster Encode
Resolution: 3840 x 2160 or 1920 x 1080

My 2017 top-spec iMac 27 using FCPX 10.4.3 can export 4k H264 material using those settings at a rate of 38 sec per 60 sec of material. So if your source material is 2 hr 17 min, it would take 1 hr 24 min to export.

Anytime you have an export performance problem, do it first to a local file then upload it. Otherwise you never can tell if the upload part or the encoding part is the bottleneck. This also allows checking the appearance of the file before committing to a big upload.

If your time lapse material is actually a bunch of still frames, not 4k video, this could change the timing. It can be time consuming to convert a large batch of high-res still frames to video. Normally you'd do that in Compressor or some other tool before using FCPX to edit it. Here's a tutorial about using Compressor to convert an image sequence to video for later editing by FCPX:

 

[Asianpork]

Try exporting directly from FCPX to a file, then upload that file to Vimeo. Use these export options:

File>Share>Master File>Settings
Format: Computer
Video Codec: H.264 Faster Encode
Resolution: 3840 x 2160 or 1920 x 1080

My 2017 top-spec iMac 27 using FCPX 10.4.3 can export 4k H264 material using those settings at a rate of 38 sec per 60 sec of material. So if your source material is 2 hr 17 min, it would take 1 hr 24 min to export.

Thank you for the advice. I’ll try that. My video was only 2:17mins. I converted all the image files into a compound clip in FCPX so I don’t understand where the bottleneck is coming from. I’ll try your suggestions. Thanks.

 

[Manzanito]

Thank you for the advice. I’ll try that. My video was only 2:17mins. I converted all the image files into a compound clip in FCPX so I don’t understand where the bottleneck is coming from. I’ll try your suggestions. Thanks.

If you make a compound clip, fcpx still has to deal with the high res pictures.

 

[Asianpork]

If you make a compound clip, fcpx still has to deal with the high res pictures.

Oh! So the compound clip isn't treated as a small video clip? When it comes to rendering FCPX is still treating the compound clip as 400-500 high res jpegs because it only turned them into a movie so it can be easily edited?

 

[joema2]

Oh! So the compound clip isn't treated as a small video clip? When it comes to rendering FCPX is still treating the compound clip as 400-500 high res jpegs because it only turned them into a movie so it can be easily edited?

Yes, as I stated in #2 above, if your timeline contains lots of high-res still frames, it is time consuming for FCPX to handle that. Just putting a compound clip wrapper around those doesn't change that. The same data is still being accessed, which you presumably would like the option to crop and zoom into without losing resolution.

In the tutorial video I posted above, they show a good way to handle high-res time lapse stills using Compressor. It can take a sequence of stills and convert those to a ProRes video file, which you then import to FCPX. This takes a while to convert and the resultant video file is pretty big, but afterwards it's very fast when imported to FCPX. There's no magic way to make the computational burden of handling high-res time lapse stills vanish without any cost.

You have the option of having Compressor convert that image sequence to a ProRes video file in various resolutions such as 4k or original camera resolution. The higher the resolution the bigger the video file but in ProRes format it will be smooth and fast in FCPX.