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teabgs

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jan 18, 2002
2,853
0
behind you
Question for the masses? I am working on a documentary for school and use FCP on G4's. There's a lot of computers in the lab my files are on. A lot of the time they are empty, so I figure I could temporarily hook two or more of them together to get them to work as one, kinda a poor man's dual. I work at the area so I can do this without any problems. Any advice on how/if I can accomplish this so that I can cut my render time down?

Much appreciated
 

menoinjun

macrumors 6502a
Jul 7, 2001
567
0
I don' think that FPC supports network rendering...but I could very well be wrong. I know that 2 doesn't...3 might. The only consumer program that I know offhand that does is Bryce 5. Other than that I've seen only custom setups. It's supposed to be really easy to do, so I betcha there is some way to do it.

-Pete

That wasn't much help was it?
 

al256

macrumors 6502a
Jun 7, 2001
945
781
It sounds like you want to "cluster" some computers together; to my knowlegde there's no clustering support for any Mac OS. The closest thing to clustering is SETI@HOME. One thing you could do is take RAM out of another system then put it another to boost the RAM which should help performance but other wise you can't hook computers together. P.S try something like Norton to defragment your HD for digital video also experment with virtual memory but VM should hurt the performance more than anything because your writing to the HD to make room for ram but then you have to re-write to the HD to save the data. Well good luck with what you have.
 

madamimadam

macrumors 65816
Jan 3, 2002
1,281
0
Re: Two G4's as one...?

I am not sure there is really a lot you can do with FCP unless you render individual scenes on different computers and then combine the movie segments on one machine.

Someone could prove me wrong (for your sake I hope so), though.
 

evildead

macrumors 65816
Jun 18, 2001
1,275
0
WestCost, USA
clusters

You can do it... and I think that FCP may even take advantage of it. I thinks it a muilti threaded app... but I could be wrong. The only problem with clustering them is that it takes time to do it and you cant just "un-cluster" them when your done. You maybeable to talk your school into letting you do it and I think you can work it so they can still be used as seperate work stations ..... but it takes time. I have never built a Mac cluster but I know that a Sun cluster is complicated.
 

menoinjun

macrumors 6502a
Jul 7, 2001
567
0
Mac os 10 clustering is supposed to be extraordinarily easy! There was an article on one of these threads about it, and they comared a mac cluster to a linux cluster. The book that tells you how to cluster linux computers is something like 40 pages, while the Mac one is one simple .pdf. Ask arn for the thread, maybe he remembers.

-Pete
 
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