[Loic De lame]

Hello.

Sorry to hear about these wild phenomenas….

Curious of a few things.

What happens when you play audio that hasn’t been through FCP in any way? (Music, downloaded video, youtube, etc.)
What is your system? (OS version, computer model, FCP version, etc.)
Do you use any capture cards or devices that you’re porting the audio/video through? Or is this just a built-in/line out/digital out signal?

How does audio play with SoundTrack (or any sound editing application you may have)?

I’m assuming you tried a Refresh Devices in FCP?

Have you looked at the app Audio/Midi Setup and checked those settings for anything weird?

What is your hard drive setup like regarding scratch disks? Wondering if, for some reason, a bad hard drive may be causing this? Weird if you’re experiencing problems with archive projects though. And I know it doesn’t make sense cause a failing hard drive would cause other problems. But figured I’d ask.

Can’t think of anything else at the moment. Hopefully I or someone else will be able to help with your answers.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Hello!

Glad to hear that the guide was of help!

I haven’t dealt with intensive codec compressions like that myself, but I have seen some similar things in qmaster where the job is finished and then it assembles all the pieces together.

There may be a few reasons for this.

The first thing is obviously your network. If it’s at minimum gigabit, then it should work fairly well and be similar in speed to an external FW800 drive. If it’s megabit, you can work with that, but of course it will take longer to transfer files over the wire.

Another thing is your cluster controller and how it’s setup with regards to the hard drives. From my experiences and understanding of Qmaster, the cluster controller gets all of the pieces and puts them together before transferring the final file to the final destination.

What this means is that if you have your cluster storage setup on a single hard drive, your hard drive is working pretty hard to gather all the pieces at the same time and writing everything at once from multiple sources. The other thing is that the size of the resulting file can be a major factor in this situation because your hard drive has to move x amount of data to itself.

If you were to have your cluster storage on a RAID array and it were setup so that data could be written to multiple disks at once, you should/would see a performance boost with regards to assimilating the compressed files. I personally haven’t had the luxury of working with this setup, but that’s the theory.

In my experience, I remember processing two files in separate jobs, but with the same priority. What happened is that once one of the files was completed, it would continue on to the next file, but the cluster was also gathering the segments. So this put a load on the cluster hard drive and slowed everything down. Once the file was assimilated, then everything ran up to snuff again. So it really has to do with, in a way, load balancing and how the data gets moved around

Hope this helps and let me know how it goes. And of course, if you have any other questions.

P.S. I’ve been experiencing strange things on my side with qmaster not working at all and service nodes dropping their segments just after starting them. One of the “intricacies” of Qmaster…..trying to figure out it’s quirks. ;~)

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

A little past 6, but still in the ballpark….;~)

Just keep in mind that this was done very quickly and I made it as thorough as possible. Feel free to get in touch with me and I will try to answer any questions I can. Hopefully this helps.

Also, if anyone spots errors or something I’ve missed or would be helpful, don’t hesitate to write it up!

Setting Up Apple Qmaster

Enjoy and please post feedback.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

*Cross fingers* If I’m quick enough. I’ll start with a PDF tutorial, just to make it quick.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Hello!

Yes, I’ve gotten it to work and have used it many, many times. Of course, as I’m sure you have discovered, there are a lot of little tricks.

I’ve been planning on putting together a tutorial for this and this seems like a good kick in the butt to start!

I will keep this post updated with results.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

If anyone is interested as well, I use this little calulator to help figure out what bitrate to use to fill DVDs the most. Don’t forget to lower the Average bitrate if you have more complex menus.

Bitrate Calculator (https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm)

You can search it on google and you’ll see a bunch of other ones it you don’t like this one.

And I have successfully made DVDs with bitrates of 7.0Mbps Average and 8.2Mbps Max. The audio gets encoded by the default Dolby Digital 2.0 at 192kbps
What you have to not forget about is that your audio is riding along the stream for the ride.

I use DVD studio and if you put the Max Bitrate at 9.0, it throughs an error that your bitrate is too high.

Hope this helps.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

I’ve been using DVD Studio Pro primarily. It’s only until recently that I tried Adobe Encore.

Both have their pros and cons. Really it comes down to what you like to work with/what you’re comfortable with. Both do have a lot more control (obviously) than iDVD and similar applications to that.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Technically, no, FW 800 and an internal drive aren’t the same speed. FW800 is 800Mb/s (megabits, not bytes) and internal drives in computers these days use eSATA, rated at 3Gb/s (gigabits).

So in MB (megabytes), that would put FW800 at 100MB and eSATA at 375MB. This is of course all theoretical. Hard drives though can only do 90MB/s. So these interfaces won’t be your bottleneck.

This is all the theory and numbers that I know. Correct me if I’m wrong.

But in either case, it depends on what format you’re going to be editing. Considering that you’re using a MacBookPro, you’re not going to be doing uncompressed footage with it. So you should be fine.

Again, as everyone is saying, external is better. Yes, you can edit on your system drive, but it isn’t going to help you that much.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Hello.

I have heard about the TLER setting on the drives. A while ago I saw that there’s a program that WD makes for windows that will enable it on the WD drives.

Here’s a link (after a really, really quick search) that I found with some info.

I do have one thing to say, which you can take it or leave it. This is from a long time ago (at least 3 years) so things most definitely have changed. But…I remember buying WD RE2 drives, three of them, and put them each in different Mac Pros. Within a week all three went down. They were not in a RAID array whatsoever (and again, they were in three different systems). I don’t know if that makes a real difference as I haven’t searched for that, but I wouldn’t imagine it would.

Interesting thing is that I have gotten lots on non-RE WD drives and they all work fine. As a side note, I have a server with WD drives (non-RE) in a software RAID on linux and haven’t had an issue with it (yet…).

Again, research, research, research. Hope this can help in some way.

~ Loïc

[Loic De lame]

Definitely second that. Best to keep the media separate from the system drive if possible for performance.

~ Loïc