Posted by Bill Lee on 11/30/05 01:16

In article <1133275974.235443.183430@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"Rayne" <mineapollo@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all, i have heard this is possible but documentation on the qmaster
> application is sparse and generally referrs to Shake. Does anyone have
> a clear idea of whether qmaster can be used to farm out FCP render jobs
> from, say compressor, to other networked workstations (in my case a
> small net of PowerMac G5s)?
>
> Thanks
> Rayne

Firstly, you cannot do this with Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 or earlier: these
come with Compressor 1.0 which although it looks like it may be able to
allow you to choose a cluster on which to render this functionality is
not included in that version.

So, in order to use a rendering cluster, you need to use FCP 5.0 or
later which has bundled with it Compressor 2.0.

From the Compressor 2.0 manual:
> Job Segmenting and Two pass (or Multi pass) Encoding
> If you choose the two-pass or the multi-pass mode, and you are using
> Compressor 2 or higher with distributed processing enabled, you may have to make a choice
> between speedier processing and ensuring the highest possible quality. The Apple
> Qmaster distributed processing system speeds up processing by distributing work to
> multiple processing nodes (computers). One way it does this is by dividing up the
> total amount of frames in a job into smaller segments. Each of the processing computers
> then works on a different segment. Since the nodes are working in parallel, the job is
> finished sooner than it would have been on a single computer. But with two-pass VBR
> and Multi-pass encoding, each segment is treated individually so the bit-rate
> allocation generated in the first pass for any one segment does not include information
> from the segments processed on other computers.

When rendering, you also need simultaneous access to the source video by
all the rendering computers, preferable something really fast like a SAN
- a 10-base-T or 802.3b network may make the a clustered job slower
rather than faster due to the video that has to be moved around just to
be worked on.

Yes, it does work though, I just didn't have enough spare computers to
make it worthwhile when I set clustering to have a play with.

Bill Lee

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