Final Cut cluster

[Lollypop]

One of my friends recently showed me what he can do with Final Cut, but coming from a more technical background I was more interested in the clustering option. How difficult would it be to set up a cluster that final cut could use, is xserv needed and will the use of 100mb Ethernet really slow down the cluster that much??

Thanks

 

[kgarner]

My school is replacing a lab full of Dual 867 MHz G4s with new 20" iMacs and they are going to use the old G4s as a render farm for Final Cut. Not sure of the specifics of how they are doing it, but it shows that you don't need XServes. While Fiber Channel would obviously be faster, I think that these all have the Gigabit Ethernet so they should be fast enough.

 

[Lollypop]

Sorry, I meant Xgrid, not xserve. My bad!

The reason I’m enquiring about the network speed is that I had a parallel programming course a few years back, and we used a 100mb network to get the Linux cluster to talk over, but I can imagine that final cut would use very big data sets and 100mb might be a big limit, would be very interesting to see how limiting exactly.

 

[ammon]

I don't think 100mb would be fast enough. You would only have sustained transfer rates of around 7-12 mb/s.

I have used gigabit for network rendering and it seems to go as fast as my harddrives!

 

[asuidrok]

Final Cut is Not a Multi Thread App

Currently, [to the best of my knowledge] Final Cut is not a multi-thread application, therefore does not support cluster/network rendering.

However, Compressor supports cluster processing, and I believe Motion does as well.

 

[Lollypop]

See the discussion has sort of died, but I have a question to bring it back to life.. I had the opportunity to bring together everyone I knows macs, all of them have gigabit ethernet and I have a 8 port gigabit switch, I want to use this opportunity to test how much of a limitation 100mb ethernet will be for something like Compressor. But here is the catch... I dont want to break the law and not everyone has final cut on their machines, is there any way I can test the limitation that 100mb ethernet will be with encoding multimedia without breaking some sort of copyright law??

Thanks in advance!!

 

[simie]

It could be done with MegaPEG.X Pro DVD Render Farm Bundle

http://www.digigami.com/press/pr/2005-03-24.pr.html

Bundles and pricing

http://www.digigami.com/megapeg/howtobuy.php

 

[Lollypop]

Thanks, was hoping for a shareware application or something, the test is purely theoretical, dont really want to spend money on something that will last a day at most.

 

[Lacero]

...I want to use this opportunity to test how much of a limitation 100mb ethernet will be for something like Compressor. But here is the catch... I dont want to break the law and not everyone has final cut on their machines

I believe you can install unlimited render licenses for Compressor on each node. You still need individual licenses for each app like FCP. The documentation for setting up an Xgrid are nearly non-existent. I have yet to see any way to work with render nodes easily.

Here's to the Crazy Ones ​

 

[simie]

http://www.macos.utah.edu/Documentation/xgrid/presentation.html.

This link provides details on how to setup Xgrid, they are using it with POV raytrace. Some of the info may be a little dated also, but it should give everyone a good idea.

Here is another link.

http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xgrid-stanford/html/install/install.html

 

[simie]

Mac devcenter provides all the info on setting up Xgrid.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/08/23/xgrid.html?page=1