Can Compressor become a render farm?

[Jeremy Garchow]

You can use QMaster and setup a cluster, but your mileage may vary.

You can’t send straight from FCP though, you have to use reference or self contained movies.

Jeremy

[Jiggy Gaton]

Thx for that Jeremy…yes, clusters…that was it. But why can’t you do a “Send to Compressor” right from the timeline? In v7 it releases the job right away so you can still work, unlike before. Anyway, I guess I can google clusters now that you reminded me of the right word:)

Phoenix Studios Nepal: A small A/V Production House in Kathmandu.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Jiggy Gaton] ” But why can’t you do a “Send to Compressor” right from the timeline?”

Clusters don’t work with the “send to” command.

https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1099

[Matt Lyon]

I’m guessing this is because Qmaster needs a discreet file on disk (be it “self contained” or “reference”) in order for it to be properly segmented and sent to the various clusters.

When you send a file directly from FCP, Compressor has to call on the FCP software libraries… which seems to be the limiting factor here.

Maybe 64 bit FCP will correct this?

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Michael Sacci]

Send to (and the old Compress With) has FCP sending one frame at a time. Before it sends it to compressor it uncompresses the frame brings it into 4:4:4 color space. The extra time that it takes is this step. So making the compression faster would make the bottle neck go away.

[Jiggy Gaton]

thx guys, and matt, what u say makes sense-sorta. it seems Apple should automate “send to” to do just that anyway, as I noticed that while “send to Compressor” no longer locks FCP like it used to, u can’t close the app while compressor is working on the job. that’s a really silly design eh.
jigs

Phoenix Studios Nepal: A small A/V Production House in Kathmandu.

[Michael Sacci]

[Jiggy Gaton] “u can’t close the app while compressor is working on the job. that’s a really silly design eh. “

won’t that be like expecting Motion or AE to keep exporting after it was closed. Send to is feeding the frames. Your work flow is there in the export a movie.

But It would be nice to have the export movie automated to where you set up the Compressor settings that automatically start once the entire movie is saved and that the exporting can happen in the back ground also. That would be the best of both worlds and maybe we will see that in FCP8.

What most people don’t realize is that compressor doesn’t actually do anything either, it is just a way to setup the encoding engine, which is who knows where. If you are encoding from a file, you can close compressor as soon as you submit the batch, it’s job is done.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Michael Sacci] “But It would be nice to have the export movie automated to where you set up the Compressor settings that automatically start once the entire movie is saved and that the exporting can happen in the back ground also. “

Watch folders for Compressor would be awesome. I think it’s a very often requested feature.

you can setup droplets and get something close to a watch folder, but it’s not really a watch folder.

[Jiggy Gaton]

Great comments all! So I guess the answer is really “not yet, stay tuned…” cheers,
jigs

Phoenix Studios Nepal: A small A/V Production House in Kathmandu.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Also, note that the render farm machines all need access to the media that’s being compressed. So you’ll need to mount that drive/s in all these machines.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India