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If you have ever worked with Apple Compressor, you will at some point be submitting your videos to be processed in batches, either to your individual computer or to a virtual cluster that you have created with your multi-core Mac (for more information on (how to create a virtual render farm/cluster with Compressor view this acticle). And if you do it enough times you might find that one of your processess in the Batch Monitor will get stuck in the great compressionists' void I like to call the "Great Compression Recession". This is where loose tongues meet up with short-fused tempers. And it usually happens when trying to meet a critical deadline.
No matter what you do, you can't stop or delete the queued batch process. There it is, stuck in both time and space, depleting your productive time. So you think to yourself, I'll just resubmit a new batch, man I'm a smarty So, after a snappy resubmission, you take note that Compressor won't compress the newly submitted batch until the frozen batch is complete. So you decide you have to get rid of that floating son of a batch that hovers their in the space time continium. So you click that little "x" on the right side of the process...and nothing happens. So what do you do?
Well, if you are anything like me you first try to force quit Compressor and relaunching it. When that doesn't work, you reboot your Mac, you then find yourself unplugging your Mac,
screaming, ranting, and eventually floating over to Facebook to run away from your problems. It's a vicious cycle.
Usually, this compression recession may have occured due to a conflict as your Mac is doing a million things at once. I've seen it happen with a corrcupt or write-protected file or directory. The originating causes of the compression void is beside the point, It could be a million little things that send your compression process into the wilderness, what we want to find is a solution. And I solution is what I have found, thanks to really geeky guys who create really niche, cool apps.
I found a great little product. It's free, it's easy, and it's a sure shot way to stick it to the batch! The name may not be the most creative, but it does the job. It's called Compressor Repair. Essentially it does the following with a simple click of a button:
Running this little application has typically worked for me right away and killed all stuck batch processes. Remember, after you run the Compressor Repair process, you may still need to reboot your Mac. There have been times when I have run the repair process, relaunched Compressor, and tried to resubmit the batch, and my virtual render cluster was missing. In this situation I will go to Apple preferences, click on Apple Qmaster, and click "stop sharing". I then immediatley click "start sharing" again. A combination of doing this, and a fresh reboot will usually kill the Great Compression Recession, and you'll soon be on the upswing of your render time, far away from mytwitface.com and actually getting some work done.
Until next time, remember, work we must, but the lunch is free!