getting the most out of 8 cores

[Thoren Lowe]

If your just using one computer then compresser should ‘see’ all the processors and distribute accordingly, bring up activity monitor and submit a batch to see if they’re all being used.

If you want to use multiple computers use apple qmaster to set up a farm.

[Rob Alexander]

Thanks but I’m sure I’ve heard that you can set up Qmaster to use the processors much more efficiently by creating multiple instances of compressor – or something like that!

[Walter Biscardi]

You go into the System Preferences > QMaster.

From here you can set up multiple ‘instances’ of QMaster and distribute the render across all the cores which can cut your render time almost in half from just submitting your job to “Your Computer.”

We’ve tested both 4 and 8 instances on our new Octo Core 3.2 and the time difference in a 26 minute show was only 2 minutes, so it really doesn’t matter if you go with 4 or 8 instances.

Launch Compressor, then go to Help > Distributed Rendering and it will walk you through how to set it up on a single computer. It’s fairly simple, though it did take us a few tries to get it to work correctly.

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

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[Walter Biscardi]

[Thoren Lowe] “If your just using one computer then compresser should ‘see’ all the processors and distribute accordingly, bring up activity monitor and submit a batch to see if they’re all being used.”

QMaster can distribute the render across the Cores on a single computer almost dropping your render time in half. Using distributed rendering on a single computer is completely different than just submitting your batch to “your computer.”

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

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[walter biscardi] “so it really doesn’t matter if you go with 4 or 8 instances. “

Four instances is recommended by barefeats and others.

It also helps to have as much RAM as possible as each instance grabs RAM.

If you can afford 16GB (or more) do it if you need to do a lot of encoding.

Jeremy

[Walter Biscardi]

[Jeremy Garchow] “It also helps to have as much RAM as possible as each instance grabs RAM.”

Definitely a good point. We’re running 10GB RAM in our Octo and it’s working out well.

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

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[Winston A. cely]

Thanks for the great tip! I’m going to set this up for mine right now. 😀

Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLC

“If God could do the tricks we can do, He’d be a happy Man.” – Peter O’Toole – “The Stuntman”

Mac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe

[Gary Adcock]

[walter biscardi] “Definitely a good point. We’re running 10GB RAM in our Octo and it’s working out well.”

Yeah
Apples new recommendations for the OS are 1gig ram per core.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows
Inside look at the IoHD

[Chris Borjis]

Thats good info to know about getting more performance even on the same system with qmaster, I assume that applies to any multi core mac?

Walter did that make any difference on your quad G5?

I’m a little peeved though that they don’t have some option in compressor to automatically do this. It shouldn’t require much effort to harness all the horsepower, if your not doing anything else on the system.

I’ve never setup a qmaster farm because I’ve heard of people getting glitch frames. Did apple fix that yet?

[Steven Ludlow]

At what point does RAM cease to offer additional benefit to encoding with Compressor? I mean…if money’s no object, will 32GB of RAM be substantially faster than 16GB?