FCP Render Farm

[Walter Biscardi]

As of right now, FCP does not support clustered rendering. Final Cut Server is just a management software.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[David Bogie]

While not specifically helpful for rendering directly from FCP’s timelines, your Studio came with a package called Qmaster. It will distribute several high-end transcoding and rendering functions across a network of Macs.

You also got two completely useless manuals on how to set it up. You can read them and pretend Qmaster works.

Visit the apple.com discussion area and read up on Qmaster. It is a cruel and needlessly sick joke.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Matt Gerard]

Absolutley correct

[david bogie] “It is a cruel and needlessly sick joke. “

Apple has lagged behind in network rendering for 2 reasons, I believe. First is that 90% of FCP editors wouldn’t see any benifits from it, as the macs nowadays are so powerful that for most of the work, rendering stuff within FCP is minimal. At least in the stuff that I do.

Second, is that farming out QT movies is much more complicated than farming out frame-stacks. That’s why most (if not all) 3d render farms output to frame-stacks. It easier to keep track of individual files (frames) in a framestack than to keep track of them within a QT movie. Plus if your render freaks out on one frame, you can just go back and render that one frame. Try doing that with a QT movie file. If you are looking for a Motion based render farm, you can do this through compressor by setting up a qMaster node farm like I did within the office. Drag your motion file into compressor and render it out to a framestack. I got it to work ONCE. After that, qMaster ignored all the other nodes on the network, and simply refuses to use those nodes. I haven’t spent alot of time digging into it, but I just picked up the Apple Pro training sereis book on compressor, I’ll see if there is anything there about it. I doubt that it says anything that hasn’t been said on the forums somewhere, but there is always hope.

Matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Chris Dillingham]

I wouldn’t say it’s a cruel, sick joke, but I do have to admit it’s too limited to use much. When I’m trying to render a broadcast safe filter on 4.5 hours of footage, it’s worthless, because I’d have to render it before I can send it through compressor to farm it out.

The manuals and the “quickcluster” options are actually not as hard to set up as I initially thought, and if you do a lot of conversions of completed videos through compressor, it’s probably worth checking out.

[Michael Bates]

Rim! On FinalCut, how do you edit the super8 footage from Flather 1991?