Multiple projects exported with same export settings. (That wasn't the plan!)

New to ShotCut, at the moment just messing about. I thought I’d be able to queue up several project exports to run in sequence, by:

  1. pause the job queue
  2. Loading the first (all editing decisions already made), export, set advanced export settings how i want them, set it off.
  3. (it sits on the still-paused queue)
  4. Load up the second, the third, repeat; in the end there are five.
  5. Unpause the job queue

The first three onto the queue had the same settings as each other. The last two had different settings (but again, the same as each other). They differed in one easily-remembered fact: The first three were 1080p HEVC (libx265), the final two were 720p AVC (libx264)

The first three have now completed, and they’re 1080p AVC. (I thought it was happening a bit fast.)

The fourth is still ongoing and I can’t tell what resolution it is from the logs so far written but the settings are the same (and match what I set for the fourth and fifth jobs.

It appears that the export settings - specifically the video and audio codec settings - are not saved as part of the queued job, but are taken from what is current (what was last selected for export?) when the job actually starts. I suspect however that the “Video” tab settings (picture dimensions etc.) are kept, as they’re actually from the project’s main video mode.

I think it’s taken the settings from the last export actually set in process, as after I started the queue I looked idly at, but did not attempt to run, the utvideo export options (wondering in passing, if it’s lossless, why there’s a quality setting), and then walked away from the computer. But the jobs started after i did that are not in utvideo.

This post: Batch export multiple projects automatically? showed up as a suggestion while I was writing the above. It looks like the answer will involve saving as xml and a bit of scripting… To recap it only seems to have had a problem with me changing the export settings from one project to the next. If you’re setting up a batch with all the same settings, it would behave as expected.

They are. You can view the job’s XML and see they are stored in the <consumer> element. I do not reproduce what you are describing. I suspect there was something in your sequence of interactions with the export panel that caused you to enqueue jobs with something other than what you expected.

if it’s lossless, why there’s a quality setting

The UI does not adapt to each codec. This part of the UI only changes according to the Rate Control. In the case of a codec that does not understand quality such as utvideo it is ignored.

Well, there’s no evidence but my own memory, but I’m pretty sure i was trying to set x265 as the encoder, but also that i was frustrated that I’d come back to it and find it changed back, or so it seemed, and having to change it back again. So it looks like more of a user interface issue was going on. Some paradigm i wasn’t in tune with. Something that a bit of scripting can nail down :wink:

I’ll have to continue testing next weekend, as tomorrow morning that computer gets rebooted into its working personality for the working week… (I think I may have just found a justification for that new M1 iMac I was lusting after!)

There is some weirdness here that can happen when you are toggling the hardware encoder option.

I think that may have happened. I wasn’t trying to use a hardware encoder (previous testing there only seemed to produce poor results), but i think it did briefly get accidentally selected due to clumsiness.

(It’s another story but videotoolbox - whether used here or on handbrake or wherever, seems to either produce terrible, unwatchable-quality videos, or if you force the quality high, enormous ones. So i stick with x264 or x265 and live with it taking longer.)

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