Anyone having Qmaster issues?

[bigbossbmb]

It's not using all 8 cores. It is using just 2 cores for the compression. By running multiple instances, my processor activity was above 90% and I didn't have anything else running.

I believe that your FCP activity is FCP rendering effects and such so that Compressor can then export it.

With a virtual cluster set up, you'd be able to cut your render time in half (at least). What took me the most time with my export this morning was rendering the QT Movie out of FCP. I had a 4:1:1 Color Smoothing filter on the sequence, so it exported close to real time (32 min). Putting that into Compressor, it did a 2-pass DVD conversion with audio in 5 minutes flat.

32 minute video --> MPEG2 in 5 minutes.... I still can't believe it.

 

[AviationFan]

Darn it, I should have known it was too good to be true.

32 minute video --> MPEG2 in 5 minutes.... I still can't believe it.

Unbelievable! Was this a 2-pass/high quality encode?

I tried one more thing, export my HDV timeline to uncompressed DV, and encoded an MPEG-2 from there. Took 2 hours for export, and another 70 minutes for the encode. Nowhere near your number, bigbossbmb, but still much better than anything I had before.

So looking at this thread, it sounds like the key to making it work is to enable distributed processing - right? Is it possible to set up distributed processing after FCS is fully installed? Needless to say, I selected "no" when I was given the option, not knowing that it might be the key to improved rendering performance.

Thanks,
Martin

 

[bigbossbmb]

Yes, it was the 2-Pass Best Quality 90 minute preset. I just picked up Graeme Nattress' Color Plugins for the Chroma Smoothing (great stuff). Now I don't have to render that effect separately in FCP after doing CC. QT Movie exports (not self contained) now take about 30 sec and the Compressor renders still take 5-5 1/2 minutes (32 minute source). So the entire exporting process is less than 6 minutes.

I'm not sure about turning it on after the install as I've tried just about every configuration of the Qmaster Pref Pane and had it not work. I've attached a screenshot of how my Qmaster is set up.

And when exporting, just choose "This Computer" with "use unmanaged resources".

 

[bilbo--baggins]

I'm having problems with QuickCluster. If I run Compressor using 'This Computer' it gets the jobs done reliably. If I use QuickCluster, a short 'test' video worked fine, but longer (15 min) jobs just crash the entire computer when it gets to the end of the first part of a linked encode. when I restart the computer there are 8 parts that were presumably going to be used to construct the single video file output. I have quickcluster set to 4 instances, and Activity Monitor shows them all at virtually full capacity. When running on 'This Computer' it's only going at about 50% capacity.

When it crashes I get the spinning wheel, the application switcher doesn't work, the dock pops up but freezes when I try to use it. I have to hold down the power button to restart the computer.

I have just used Pacifist to reinstall from my Logic Studio discs, but the same happens now as before.

 

[Eric Piercey]

I've been struggling with Compressor and Qmaster for awhile now. Apparently you can't export straight from FCP to Compressor (and use quickclustering) per this Apple tech article.

Which is absolute crap if you ask me. This was supposed to be the bread and butter of my 8 core machine, exporting as many as 200 FCP projects for transcode to mpeg2 for each horse show I shoot video for. Having to create an intermediate movie for each one (in order to use muti-processing,) even just a reference movie which still take a couple minutes at the least, is less time efficient (with quickclustering on direct to C from FCP exports not working) then simply turning quickclustering off and using one processor. The way I've done it is to get about 5 or so FCP projects to the point of export. Then I send each one directly to compressor from FCP. Then I'd cut and paste all of the indivudual jobs (tabs) created into one job (tab) in compressor and run the whole batch. Since FCP is useless while Compressor is processing from a direct FCP export this is more efficient then sending each FCP project one at a time and submitting them one at a time.

Anyway.... sorry I tend to be long winded. My symptoms were the same. The machine would go into a death spiral as soon as the job was submitted and nothing would bring it back short of hard powering off the machine. I hope this is resolved in some future update.

 

[MIDI_EVIL]

This is concerning since we have just purchased an 8-Core and FCP to produce our HDV documentaries.

So it seems that rendering with a Mac Pro's full potential is crippled because of a licensing issue?

 

[brightwater]

Using Virtual Cluster with Compressor

I beleive the problem is that virtual clusters only work with self contained QT movies. Since a common workflow is to send a sequence to Compressor this is probably what most are doing with poor outcomes. That was happening to me. I tried compressing QT self contained movie using Virtual Cluster and it worked like a champ.