I decided to run compressor in the final release of the mac version and it actually made my disk image 10% larger. any one else seen this?
Compressor crashes and gets error I did what you suggested, and the first time I ran it the application and computer froze while I was defragmenting. So I ran it again, and it seemed to finish, but at the end I got an error message stating that it could not complete, and I should run disk tools to defragment the image. After running disktools, my disk image is back to the original size that it was before I ran the compressor the first time. So I am not sure that it really did anything. i started with about 7.5gb in size, ran it the first time under RC2 and it jumped to 8.5 GB Ran it again today as described above and its now back to 7.5GB
Usually it should not happen. That means that you had expirienced some serious crashes with this VM and virtual disk had some allocation errors which prevents Compressor from success. After ImageTool fixed all allocation errors you could run Compressor again to get actual results.
It ran ok it ran and dropped the size to 6.89 GB, but oddly in parallels it shows up at 15gb now. I attached a picture so you can see the Get Info from the mac and the size in parallels after compressing.
You mean in guest OS it shows 15G? Its OK because guest OS doesn't know anything about compression and thinks it has full sized plain disk.
On your picture Windows shows 24,3G total size and 15,3G of free space. It means 9G of used space which is actually only 6,9G file in Mac OS X. So what are you worry about?