06-03-2008, 02:12 AM
I just tried Apple QMaster, included with Final Cut Studio 2. For those of you who don't know, it's a distributed processing system that enables you to use the processing power of networked macs to carry out some specific tasks. I just made a 3 mac cluster to speed my Compressor encoding.
Ad hoc setup of the simple cluster took about 15-20 minutes. Including the installation of necessary software on the nodes. Now, when I submit a job to Compressor, it takes (roughly) a third of the time. I'm sitting here posting and watching the processors of all 3 machines hum along at 100% while I watch how Batch Monitor splits up the encoding among all three machines.
I honestly have not been this impressed by a technology in a long time. Anyone who uses Compressor (among some other FCS2 programs) needs to set this up if they haven't already.
Ad hoc setup of the simple cluster took about 15-20 minutes. Including the installation of necessary software on the nodes. Now, when I submit a job to Compressor, it takes (roughly) a third of the time. I'm sitting here posting and watching the processors of all 3 machines hum along at 100% while I watch how Batch Monitor splits up the encoding among all three machines.
I honestly have not been this impressed by a technology in a long time. Anyone who uses Compressor (among some other FCS2 programs) needs to set this up if they haven't already.