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Resetting Virtual Cluster
For some reason, my Virtual Cluster on my 8core doesn’t seem to work anymore. I can submit and job, and then it just runs the “time elapsed” counter and nothing else happens.
I tired turning off my “instances” and rebuilding a new Virtual Cluster the same way I did originally, but to no avail. I understand virtual clusters are a bit persnickety to begin with…
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9 Replies
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How long have you let it run? Sometime it takes 10 minutes or more for the damn thing to show up and give some sort of countdown/progress report. Once it does show up, the job is well under way. They easiest way to see if your computer is working is to open the Activity monitor and check it out to see if the cores are cranking. All I can say is be patient. AS long as everything is setup correctly, it is working even though there’s no feedback from Compressor/batch monitor to let you know that at first.
Jeremy
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Huh. When this computer was brand new, it would take of compressing like a banshee.
I’ll give it a try. The batch I ran last night went from 6pm to 4:15am without clustering.
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I have also found that some settings in Compressor will totally confuse it. What format are you coming from and what format are you going to?
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DVHD 720p/23.98 to a custom h.264 setting. Basically the Web Download LAN setting, but I had to force the output pixels because it kept making a square frame instead of the 16:9
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Did you make the preset from scratch or simply duplicate the supplied preset?
Try making it from scratch and make sure that your fields are set to ‘same as source’ and not progressive as it might try to deinterlace your already progressive footage which slows the whole damn thing down. When setting up your new setting make sure to check the ‘allow job segmenting’ box. Also, single click on your footage in the batch widow (the big box on the left) to bring up the inspector on your source footage. Make sure that the field dominance is set to progressive for your source footage. It should be already, but I have seen compressor make mistakes. This way, Compressor will know your footage is progressive, and then if you set it to same as source in the settings inspector, it will not try to mess with anything having to do with fields. I have also found that a mulitpass h264 with virtual clustering goes slower than no clustering. I think Virtual Clustering becomes a Cluster f*ck with VBR/mulitpass material, but I have no hard evidence on that except my own practice so take that advice with a grain of salt as I am still wandering through the mire with all of that myself. EVen with virtual clustering turned off, sometimes my activity monitor will spike up to %600 with multipass h264s.
Jeremy
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Ok. duh… don’t know what happened, but it was set to 1 instance for Compressor jobs and 8 for Shake. Putting it back to 4 instance for Compressor and it started working again.
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Ha! Yes, setting it up correctly in first place might help. It’s a confusing situation if you ask me. It’s not very user friendly.
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It really has been tough. I remember trying to set up multiple computer clusters back in Compressor 2 with our G5’s…. ended up more complicated than I was willing to deal with.
What my head editor keeps asking me is when will FCP have built in cluster support? So that 30 min render of effects on that HD timeline takes 5 minutes and 3 or 4 Xserves….
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Oh man. That would be so ideal, but I cannot imagine the problems and headaches people would start posting.
Jeremy
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