Cluster rendering: what’s wrong?

[Jerry Hofmann]

You did exactly the right thing by posting separate questions in two threads, and you’re welcome to post as many questions as you’d like.

Take a ride on the reading railroad! https://www.macworld.com/2006/01/secrets/marcchreateside/index.php is a dandy article on how to set up the cluster… Gigabit would be better, but not mandatory…

Jerry

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[Walter Biscardi]

[PaulJBis] “[First of all, sorry for the 2 posts in a row. Is there any netiquette rule in this board about not posting too many separate messages, even if they are about completely unrelated subjects?]”

Nope, just rude to post multiple times about the same issue over a short period of time. 🙂

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

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[Paulo Jan]

Thanks for the answer. The instructions in your link are for setting up a cluster manually (as opposed to a QuickCluster), which is what I did at first: configure a master computer, “services only” nodes, etc.; and the resuts I got were so disappointing (a 17 sec. clip took 2 minutes to export, vs. 40 sec. in a single computer) that I decided to set everything up as a QuickCluster and leave the default options. Apparently, it hasn’t worked too well either…

Those of you using render clusters: are you all using Gigabit Ethernet? Is there any other trick I’m missing?

[David Bogie]

> Is this normal? Could the bottleneck be in the 100 Mbps. Ethernet?< There is a QMaster forum over at apple.com. It's as useless as the software is worthless, though. There are only a few people in the world who have successfully gained anything from Qmaster and they do not post. Qmaster (like distributed rendering in After Effects, Aperture v1.0 and OpenGL) is a cruel joke. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[John Schroter]

We had some changes to a piece I compressed last Friday and had to recompress the updated version in a hurry today, so I set up a quick cluster with a dual 2.6GHz G5 controller node and 2 QuadCore G5s. I followed the manual and it was set up in about 5 minutes.

I compressed a 4 minute DVCPRO HD FCP clip to a 1920×1080 MPEG-2 multiplex’ed file using compressor and it took 20 minutes. When I compressed the same file on Friday from the dual 2.6 G5 it took 45 minutes. I don’t know what I did right or differently, but it worked as advertised. I set the networked computers as ‘service only’. We may be gigabit ethernet, but maybe not, since we’re tied into the corporate LAN as well. I mounted a common shared drive drive with the original media on all three systems – but I don’t think it will work anyway unless you do this.

I initially thought it was taking longer than the original local compression because the status read 3% complete with nearly 2 hours remaining – until I switched the batch monitor window to show the cluster I had set up and realized it had burned through 90% of the compression in 15 minutes (there’s a drop-down window on the top right of the batch monitor window in compressor where you can check the status of each computer in the cluster including the local controller). Thinking back, I think I paused the compression on the controller machine and double-checked the service machines and then came back to the controller and started it again. Maybe this kicked the other processors up a notch or something, but I really don’t know. It’s discouraging to hear about the mixed results you’re all having, though. I thought I was really on to something.

I tested the file and it looks great – and done in almost a third of the time. I was pretty impressed. I’m now looking for a way to harness Qmaster for AE renders. Any pointers? I don’t want to write custom command lines. I just want to send the render to the Quick Cluster I’ve set up. Probably wishful thinking, though.