Are your Compressor jobs taking a long time? How about sending jobs to a virtual cluster in your Mac or a cluster of external machines to distribute the workload and speed up the process. This Apple document shows you how.
This new support document from Apple tells you how to send Compressor jobs to clusters for faster processing. What it won't tell you is how to set up a cluster in the first place. There are two types of clusters you can build. A virtual or QuickCluster can be made from the extra cores in your Mac and an external cluster is made from sharing the processing power of other Macs on a network.
Setting up a virtual or 'Quick Cluster' was previously achieved in the Apple Qmaster preference pane. To build a virtual cluster with Compressor 4, the machine has to be made available for sharing via the Apple Qmaster menu 'Share this Computer' in Compressor.
Click 'Share this computer as a QuickCluster', enable the Compressor services checkbox and then select the options. The rule of thumb is to set the number of instances to half the number of cores you have. Here we can see 2 selected as the iMac has four cores. Is the rendering service left over from Shake we wonder?
Click ok and you've set up a virtual or QuickCluster.
If you want to set up a cluster with extra machines, a copy of Compressor needs to be installed on each and the services shared. We don't know if the same copy of Compressor can be used, but $50 per Mac isn't going to break the bank.
We did a quick compression test on the office iMac with and without the QuickCluster and were pretty staggered to see how the virtual cluster utilised nearly 100% of all the cores compared to about 60-70% of utilisation without. It proves the gain is worthwhile even on machines with a low number of cores. The test was very basic with a simple virtual cluster setup, so we would be very interested to hear from anybody via the comments section who has some real comparison numbers from larger jobs.
We would recommend a good read of Apple's Qadministrator Help document which goes into much more detail on how to configure a cluster, especially if you intend to use external machines. It can be found in the Qadministrator menu bar which is started from Compressor.
And now onto the main reason why we started the story, how to send Compressor jobs to clusters from Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5! One point to emphasise here, this method will not speed up your renders or the export process itself. FCPX has to export a fully rendered file first before automatically loading that into Compressor.
Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, Compressor 4: Using "This Computer Plus" or other configured cluster
Read the original KnowledgeBase article here.
For Final Cut Pro X 10.0.4 or later, follow these steps to share using "This Computer Plus" or another configured cluster:
- Choose Export Media from the Share menu.
- In the Options tab for "Video codec:" choose Current Settings, and for "Open with:" choose Compressor.
- Click Next and Save to save the exported file.
- When Compressor opens add a setting to the open job.
- Submit the job.
- In the submit dialog, click This Computer Plus to share to available unmanaged nodes, or select a configured cluster from the drop down.
For Motion 5.0.4 or later to share using This Computer Plus or another configured cluster follow these steps:
- Choose Export Movie from the Share menu.
- In the Options tab for "Video codec:" choose Current Settings, and for "Open with:" choose Compressor.
- Select Next and Save to save the exported file.
- When Compressor opens add a setting to the open job.
- Submit the job.
- In the submit dialog click This Computer Plus to share to available unmanaged nodes, or select a configured cluster from the drop down.
Note: Share to This Computer Plus is no longer available as an advanced option from the Share pane in Final Cut Pro X 10.0.4 or later or Motion 5.0.3 or later.