Compressor 4.1 Blank Window

cseeman wrote: Bug, maybe not. Bad documentation, yes IMHO.

That's pretty much what I said, right? Someone at Apple acknowledged to me that it is not clear in the docs, and they would update to make it clear. I have no clue what they mean by "instances". I only got that they'd try to clarify it eventually. Just passing along information.

But you have to admit, the UI is pretty sweet now.

High Profile CABAC encoding FINALLY added. That's great.

I really hope they explain the apparent 1 Instance limit ASAP.

Here is the scoop on instances, from my good colleague Larry Jordan. In order to use more than one instance (the default), you have to have a Mac with i5 or i7 CPU, and a minimum of 6 cores. The rule of thumb is: set the number of instances to two LESS than the total number of cores on your system.

BenB wrote: Here is the scoop on instances, from my good colleague Larry Jordan. In order to use more than one instance (the default), you have to have a Mac with i5 or i7 CPU, and a minimum of 6 cores. The rule of thumb is: set the number of instances to two LESS than the total number of cores on your system.

So 6 cores get you 4 Instances
but 4 cores limits you to 1.

So only MacPros with 6, 8, 12 cores can have multiple instances.
Hmm….

That makes a lot of sense. I'd hope they'd have some reasonable explanation for doing so, but it's rather annoying to see media encoder use up 700%+ of my iMac and compressor average around 300%.

If I could get the distributed transcoding to work, it wouldn't be too big of a deal. I've successfully added another iMac, but it just says unavailable on the status. Not to derail the thread (although it's already off topic), has anyone got it working yet?

cseeman wrote: High Profile CABAC encoding FINALLY added. That's great.

In my playing it's been a disappointment because I cant select both High Profile CABAC and Multi-pass encoding at the same time. Multi-pass using High Profile CAVLC has given me better output. Don't know if this is something particular to my set-up.

Me too. CAVLC Multipass, CABAC can't select Multipass.
Perhaps Apple determined there was no appreciative quality difference on multipass once CABAC is used in their implementation of H.264.