Hello All,

Running 2 completely hardware-identical systems. One with MC 8.2 and the other with 8.3.0. I've been having a weird issue and I thought 8.3.0 might fix it but alas it has not. When I go to export H264 out of my timeline it seems like Avid freezes. I either get the beach ball or the blue status bar and Avid is frozen. But if I wait a few minutes (depending on H264 compression type and length of sequence) all of a sudden the quicktime is exported and Avid is back to normal. So the entire time Avid was actually exporting despite acting like it was frozen. This happens ONLY with H264 compressions. DNxHD, ProRes, SAS, Ref, XD CAM, Animation, etc all export just fine.  I've tried a number of projects both in 1080 & 720 ranging from 23.976 to 59.94 and the problem persists across the board. I've tried exporting to the desktop, internal SSD, internal 7200rpm, internal RAID 0 stripe and external drives connected via eSATA, F800 and USB 3.0. Results are all the same. I even tried a 30-minute 1080p24 sequence. Avid was frozen for about 40 minutes but sure enough there was my QT at the end of it. This problem has been around since I upgraded from MC 5.5 to 8 at the beginning of the year. I had no issues whatsoever with 5.

Its not the biggest drawback in the world but it shouldn't be happening and if I have a longer sequence I'd like to be able to give my producer an ETA.

Here are my system specs:

MacPro 5,1 

2x 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeons

32GB RAM

Mountain Lion 10.8.5

Mojo DX

Boot drive is a PCIe SSD Mercury Accelsior from OWC. This shouldn't be causing the issue as I have seen no other weird errors or performance problems with Avid or any of the other software Im running (full latest Adobe suite, FCP7, DaVinci Resolve).

Thanks in advance for any help and information!

Avid pretty much stinks at exporting H.264 files.  Our normal procedure to is export quicktime ref to Sorenson or Adobe Media Encoder and let them do the actual conversion.  It works much faster this way.

I disagree. MC5 & 6 were fantastic at exporting and compressing H264s (and quick with the right settings for streaming). I skipped 7 and went straight to 8 and now the issues. Obviously there are a million other ways i can compress my H264, but thats not the issue/question. I don't think the inquiry is unreasonable. Any moderators care to chime in? This is my 2nd question on these forums in 6 years. The first one also went unanswered and ignored.

mzaharinov:

I disagree. MC5 & 6 were fantastic at exporting and compressing H264s (and quick with the right settings for streaming).