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  • Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

    Qmaster key to getting performance out of Compressor & 8 core macpro

    Posted by Llewelyn Roderick on March 27, 2009 at 6:25 am

    Dear Cows

    I’m in the middle of a particularly demanding week. I’ve got to get 2 feature doccies out with multiple versions of each including HD to SD conversions, PAL to NTSC (thank goodness no deinterlacing) etc. So Compressor has been working overtime (Best settings where possible).

    The one film is 108050i & 105min long and when I first submitted the HD to SD conversion into Compressor it settled down on a 17hr render (Best Resizing). NOT what I was expecting from my 8Core (Harpertown 2.8Ghz with 10Gb RAM).

    I opened Activity Monitor and noticed to my frustration that Compressor was barely using a third of available processor resources! My heart sank. Like many of you I’ve tried and failed using Qmaster but now it seemed the only way to unlock the multi-threading capability of my macpro and the possibility of a weekend at home instead of watching renders at the office.

    Anyway, long story short:
    I’m only using Qmaster on one machine. I’m not attempting to get it to work across my network with my other machines (for now. Baby steps)

    I only use the Qmaster settings pane in System Prefs.

    I’m only looking to harness the potential of this one machine for now.

    I’ve experimented with various ‘instances’ of virtual clusters and have found that 6 clusters renders faster than 8 clusters (slightly) but more importantly, it leaves some system resources free for root processes and my render failure rate has dropped to 0%.

    In the above example my render time went from 17 hours to 5 and a half hours! That’s more like it!

    The only problem I can’t solve is setting up the ‘Shared Cluster Storage’ on a drive other than the internal system drive! My 2TB Rocket Raid is the obvious choice but when I select a folder on there it hangs Qmaster and I have to force quit System Prefs. I’ve enable ‘Read&Write’ permissions on the RAID for all users but it still doesn’t work. Any help here will be much appreciated.

    That’s it for now. Next step is to begin to use all three my machines to handle these big renders out of Compressor.

    If anybody wants to keep this thread going with their experiences of how to get Qmaster to work them it, it will be great. My feeling is Qmaster is a lot like Color; very good if you use it a specific way, very frustrating if you don’t. Now I just have to find out what that very specific way is.

    PS: my estimation of Compressor has skyrocketed since I’ve begun to use the ‘Best’ settings where possible. With the 8-core/Qmaster combo it unlocks the best of what software encoding has to offer. I did a PAL to NTSC conversion using best settings and went into my local VT house (to dump to tape) and the guy who does the conversions with a Telestream was actually the one who was impressed by the quality of the PAL->NTSC.

    Llewelyn @ Fireworks
    HD for indies post production
    http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

    8Core 2.8Ghz 10GB RAM with BM Decklink HD Pro, 2TB Raid, 20″ Sony PAL SDI CRT & 19″ Sony HD SDI LCD + 4Core 3Ghz edit 2

    Ben Watson replied 17 years, 1 month ago 5 Members · 5 Replies
  • 5 Replies

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