• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Two macs and compressor, do I need a SAN ?

  Posted by Dominik Wojtarowicz on May 2, 2009 at 4:34 am

  I have two mac pros I work on day to day and would like to take advantage of the 16 total cores to accelerate my compressor encodes. I know about virtual clustering and using all the cores on each of the machines, but the problem I’m running into is when I want to spread the task over two computers. What happens is that compressor copies the media to be encoded over to other locations on each of the computers, even with an aggregated gigabit ethernet connection between the two, the latency of copying big files for each instance of compressor takes more time than the savings the second machine would provide.

  There is an option in the qmaster preference panel under the advanced tab that allows to change the cluster storage location, the issue with that option is that pointing it to a common drive does not work. It has to be a local drive on each of the machines which means data needs to be moved around.
  Is there any option to make the media files be accessible to both of my computers as if they were local ? Is that what a SAN system would do ? If that is the case it seems like a very expensive option (more than another computer would be). Any way to trick qmaster to access the media across the network without attempting local copies ?

  If not, what central storage solutions are there for small studios that cost under 5k ?

  Dominik Wojtarowicz replied 17 years ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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