Compressor Virtual Clusters
Anyone out there using Final Cut Studio 2 needs to read this post.
If you have any of the Intel based Mac products and want to get a little bit more oomph out of Compressor all you have to do is setup a virtual cluster.
Compressor setup on a solid network is a really cool way to encode and transcode alot of footage quickly. The problem is that sometimes you don’t have any other macs on your network (or a shared storage setup).
A virtual cluster allows you to run an instance of compressor that acts like all of the processors on your machine are machines that it can use to distribute its work to. All of those dual core and quad core and dual quade core systems out there don’t really use more than one processor during an encode (generally compressor distributes the encode to one processor and then to another and then to another in a multi-core tease that drives anyone that knows what’s going on under the hood insane).
QMaster Panel - Setting up a QMaster Virtual Cluster
To set up a virtual cluster go System Preferences > Apple QMaster
QMaster is the distributed rendering/compressing app that ships with Final Cut Studio. It’s basically your network traffic controller. The easiest way to get up and going is to use a QuickCluster with services.
Check the Share and Managed boxes for Compressor and set your instances to how ever many processors you have - my laptop is a dual core so I set it to two - if you’re lucky enough “gishcluster” and click on start sharing.
Now - next time you’re in Compressor and you want to take advantage of your virtual cluster just submit a batch and instead of using the “This Computer” option send it to the cluster you just created.
There are a few caveats about this whole process:
- You must have the machine connected to the network protocal that you had it connected to when you installed compressor - this is beating of an issue but one that sort of makes sense - compressor was meant to be an application that lived on a stable network so it wants to know what ports are being used and how everything is connected. If you installed compressor on a laptop and you had the ethernet port setup for your network connection then you always have to use an ethernet connection to use compressor and its virtual cluster (it will hang/freeze if you try it with wireless).
- Sometimes things just freak out - I used a setup like this for a lot of very intensive encoding for 3 months straight and only had a couple of issues - generally they were resolved by following this procedure exactly
- quitting compressor and batch monitor
- turning off the QMaster sharing
- restarting the machine
- opening compressor and clicking on Compressor > Reset Background Processing
- quitting compressor
- turning QMaster sharing back on
- opening compressor and submitting my batch
- Keep your Final Cut Studio install discs and serial numbers handy - if the above steps don’t work and you’ve checked your network connection then you may have to reinstall. It sucks but that’s part of the risk you take with using something in a slightly different way than it was intended.
