Render Beast

Clusters in QMaster can be used to help with encoding with Compressor, but will not work with speeding up renders within Final Cut Pro. Clusters do not work with any exports directly from Final Cut Pro. The main reason for this is that QMaster will run multiple instances of itself to achieve "multi-core" processing. Final Cut Pro cannot do that. Its licensing will only allow one version of itself to be run at at time on a network/machine.

Well Final Cut Pro can do that, but you have to purchase a license for each computer it's going to run on.

Regardless of whether you use Compressor alone or with FCP, you still need something like Qmaster to manage your jobs. So if the problem is your network you need to fix that rather than (fruitlessly) try to find an alternative over FireWire or something. If your Ethernet has "too much traffic" then you must have a dumb hub - use an Ethernet switch.

You also need shared storage for all the nodes to access. Ideally this would be something like FibreChannel but AFP sharing over Ethernet will work too, just more slowly. (And depending on what you're transcoding it may not save you much time.)

One aspect, is you mentioned you are still based on the FC Studio 2 suite. This means you can readily install the 'AppleQmasterNode' package onto PowerPC Macs, and use those as additional service nodes in a cluster, and/or as a cluster controller.

This can also be done with the FC Studio 3 suite. However the installer for the AppleQmasterNode package refuses to install onto PowerPC machines. This is very easy to remedy, as mentioned elsewhere in my posts, should you need it.


Another aspect, is your network connections. If you truly believe that your primary LAN is busy enough that it can adversely affect something like a Qmaster farm, (which is quite feasible), then here are a couple of suggestions:

Your Mac Pros have two Ethernet ports. Use one to connect to the primary LAN, and use the other to connect to a [newly created] isolated LAN. Setup your Qmaster nodes to only publish themselves onto the isolated LAN. Those aging PowerPC Macs can be set up the same, if they have two Eth ports. Otherwise, they can be used only on the isolated LAN.

You can dedicate one or more of the aging PowerPC Macs directly to individual Intel Mac Pros, via Firewire connection. (Use the 800 ports if available!!!) The Qmaster setup in this case, would only allow the processing node services of the dedicated PPC Mac to be used by the attached Intel Mac Pro --- you don't want its service to be seen on the LAN, as then the service traffic would be get onto the LAN, which is what you are trying to avoid!

Note that if the PPC Macs have only one Eth port, and still need to be used for some other purpose, and need access to the primary LAN, and possibly the Internet, this will affect how feasible it is to use these suggestions.

Also note that in any Qmaster configuration, you need to run some A-to-B comparison tests, to figure out when/if you get any benefit [as compared to just processing on the local machine]. Size of the job, type of the job, etc., all come into play as to when benefits are to be seen. This knowledge then becomes part of your "toolset", such that you make decisions to send certain jobs to the cluster, and others local.

Cheers,
-Rick