How come our "renderfarm" is not useable?

We're trying to set up a "renderfarm" - ie. distributed encoding - and everything seems to go well for the most part.

We add 4 Macs to a group and the group is then visible in the "Process on" - but we cannot choose it as it's "greyed out".

Do any of you guys know why?

Hi Kenneth,

Do you mean the cluster group is greyed out when you drop a video file into Compressor, or is it only greyed out when you send an FCPX timeline to Compressor?

-Ronny

ronny courtens wrote: Hi Kenneth,

Do you mean the cluster group is greyed out when you drop a video file into Compressor, or is it only greyed out when you send an FCPX timeline to Compressor?

-Ronny

Hi!

Well, actually I just checked and it seems that it's only when I send from FCPX.

If I drag a file into compressor, I CAN choose the cluster.

It's the first option we need to get working, though - we don't want to export a file from fxpc just to encode it in compressor.

Yep, that's why I asked.

And I'm afraid I have some bad news for you: distributed encoding is only available in the Compressor application, and not in any other application that has a "send to Compressor" option such as FCPX. Here's from the Compressor 4.1 whitepaper:



In fact it has always been like that. Distributed processing from within FCP over Compressor has only worked for a short while, but it was so troublesome that Apple decided to abandon it again.

Your best option for distributed processing is to export a Master File from FCPX (which is really very fast) and then batch-convert your Master Files in Compressor using the group of computers. For long H.264 encodes this could save you a lot of time.

BTW I see you are in Vejle. I'm flying over to Denmark on Tuesday to visit some friends at Metronome Productions in Copenhagen

-Ronny

ronny courtens wrote: Yep, that's why I asked.

And I'm afraid I have some bad news for you: distributed encoding is only available in the Compressor application, and not in any other application that has a "send to Compressor" option such as FCPX. Here's from the Compressor 4.1 whitepaper:

Your best option for distributed processing is to export a Master File from FCPX (which is really very fast) and then batch-convert your Master Files in Compressor using the group of computers. For long H.264 encodes this could save you a lot of time.

Oh, I didn't know that - I'll give it a go. If, in the end, the extra time / space spent on creating an extra original masterfile for this purpose is "earned" back home by having a faster encoding, it's the way for us to go. In this case we're talking about dailies, that really has to be done super effectively!

ronny courtens wrote: BTW I see you are in Vejle. I'm flying over to Denmark on Tuesday to visit some friends at Metronome Productions in Copenhagen

-Ronny

Really? It's a small world