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FCP 5.0.4, exporting to iPod video… render farm?
At work we’ve been trying out different encoding presets to deliver some of our programming online. I’m currently editing with FCP 5.0.4 on a dual 2 GHz G5, media on a bunch of LaCie d2 drives. The problem I’m seeing here is with speed.
I have an hour and a half program that I’ve finished and am now exporting using the iPod video preset, and it’s taking forever. Right now it says it’s about 25% through with it, and 9 hours yet to go. One of my colleagues suggested creating a very small render farm, by adding a Mac mini and letting it do the encoding while I’m able to use the G5 for other things–perhaps even doing more editing while the mini churns.
Is this something that’s possible? Are there other ways this might be done?
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8 Replies
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Apparently outputing using the iPod encoder takes a very long time – that’s just how it is I guess. I suppose you could set up a little render farm, but your mac mini is not going to crunch nearly as fast as your dual 2GHz G5, considering that the best mini out there is a 1.4 GHz G4. If delivery time is of no importance, then you could figure out a way to set it up as long as you’re willing to wait probably more than twice as long as you would have to on the G5. As long as you weren’t working on the same project (or media files) at the same time… I’d say edit off one of your firewire drives with the mini (don’t worry – it might be small, but it can handle it.. without some of the RT benifits) while the G5 continues exporting. Save all your complicated, math-intesive edits on the mini for the end, so that hopefully the G5 is done exportring as you finish roughing out your edit. Then swap the firewire drive back to the G5 and continue editing all the “heavy stuff”. If you’re working with the same media… this won’t work, and you’d also run into trouble even if you farmed out to the mini because the export may be accessing files that you’re also trying to edit with.
Good luck.
Ben
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Yeah, it seems that the issue isn’t so much render time per se, it’s productive time. So if it takes, say, nine hours but I can still use my G5 for other stuff, that’s a lot better than four hours during which my G5 is occupied.
But I would have to do drive swappin’, eh? There’s no way that I could have my load of drives connected to both machines, and switch off which projects are using which drives in software, is there?
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When do you sleep? Durint that time period do the encoding since you are not actively working at your mac.
Unless or course you are into sleep editing via FCP.
Tony Salgado
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[Kevin Monahan] “Encode overnight.”
The only problem here is that when I’m in full-tilt production mode, I’m already using overnights for either capturing or editing to tape.
Is there a way to do both? Like, with AppleScript, if I know that the last thing I do before I leave is to get a two hour program onto tape, can I write something like “wait two and a half hours, then tell Final Cut Pro to close this file, yes to save the changes, then open this-here other file and get it encoding”?
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To my knowledge you can’t connect a firewire or usb device to two machines at the same time… it would cause tremendous issues with BUS access, and what would happen if both machines were trying to access the a BUS at the same time? Not good. The only way I can see doing it would be to share the drives over a network, like hooked up to a server machine (unless they were network drives, in which case you would only need a router) that could be dedicated to serving the data out to many machines without processing the data at all (you don’t want to share them straight off the machines you’re working on, because they will slow down your machine as they serve the data out to another one)… However you’d need a very fast network, and still could run into speed problems with multiple machines trying to access the same data at the same time.
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Use isquint, quicktimes ipod video export is painfully slow or try one of a thousand other bits of freeware to do your encoding all are much faster than quicktime.
Nicholas Raeburn
Organic Productions -
[Erik Ivar Olsen] “Is there a way to do both? Like, with AppleScript,”
Wouldn’t THAT be nice. 😉
FCP is one of the few apps that is not Apple Scriptable. 🙁
Keep in mind it was ported from Macromedia “back in the day”.Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Seminar!
fcpworld.com
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