I'm in love with Apple Qmaster!

I started working on a DVD project last week which contains about 6.5 hours of footage onto 2 dual layer DVDs (2.5 hours and 4 hours of extras). We need to produce a glass master as soon as possible, which means I need to do some high quality 2-pass encoding - a time expensive process. While adding a bunch of files to Compressor, I noticed the little option that said 'Cluster: This computer' and a light went on inside my head.

I haven't used Qmaster for Compressor before - I don't normally encode hours of video footage at once - but as it's the weekend most of the other computers in the office will be idle and i started thinking 'how easy would it be to set up a render farm?'

The last time I did this was using an ancient version of Qmaster - possibly the first version - where I could send Shake and Maya command line instructions and it would create a shared partition over the network and all four processors (2 dual-cpu G4s) would crank out the render. However, I do remember the pain of setting this up, which in the end required me to give them both static IP addresses and have the shared storage on the same volume as the cluster controller.

Despite this painful experience, I was also well aware of our looming deadline and I became curious to discover whatever I could do to speed up our encoding. In the Apple Qmaster's help menu is a link to a PDF file called "Distributed Processing Setup", which put all my fears at ease once I reached page 50:

QuickClusters offer a simple and automated way to create and configure clusters, and an alternative to creating and configuring clusters manually with Apple Qadministrator. QuickClusters with enabled unmanaged support will auto-configure themselves and use any available unmanaged services on the same local network (subnet). QuickClusters listen for unmanaged service advertisements and may mark orremember any of them for later use.

Turning it on was simple: System Preferences -> Apple Qmaster -> "QuickCluster with services" -> Start Sharing
So that's the cluster controller set up. But the client machines! They might not have FCP installed! Thankfully Apple has provided an installer on the FCS2 Install disk that sets up a computer as a Qmaster node - perfect! The caveats are that it won't encode AC3 without a unique DVDSP license and you can't take advantage of distributed rendering directly from FCP or DVDSP without each node having it's own unique license. But we're using Compressor...

So I fired up the installer on my trusty PowerBook G4 and restarted. The installer asks if you want the node to be active right away - brilliant, don't have to wait to restart and then set it all up! I clicked 'No' so I could do it myself so I knew how to set it up manually: and it took 2 clicks.

That's right: 2 clicks. "Services only" and "Start sharing". The Cluster Controller found it right away, and a the only extra step required in Compressor is to change the Cluster from "This Computer" to the Cluster's name. I tested with a short clip, and it produced a flawless MPEG2 file, complete with parsing information. Another caveat: it automatically attempts to copy all the assets onto a shared volume created in the system disk, I just had to redirect this in the Advanced panel of the Apple Qmaster preference pane to the RAID drive and it was screaming away.

So the Powerbook test was fine, let's see how it holds up with more than 2 machines...