submit button greyed

Compressor and Apple Qmaster have to be in the same place.

Simple fix. In my case all I had to do was make sure Compressor and Apple Qmaster were in the same place. I had made a folder in my applications to put all my editing apps. I simply put compressor BACK into the regular APPLICATONS area and BAM-O! Done. Hope this brings relief.

I tried repairing disk permissions but that didn't work for me. What DID work was a free download of Compressor Repair 2.1.1 which you can download from http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/Compressor-Repair-Download-45934.html.

I ran the program, waited 30 secs as it suggests then restarted Compressor 4. I then found that the submit button was no longer greyed out and I could convert files successfully.

HI Naramine, I'd propose the reason the "submit" button is greyed out is becaus ethe CLUSTER where you want to submit the job is probbaly not fully resolved. I'll assuem you are using Compressor.app V4 (the one with FCPX July 2011). Try this to see if this is true...

1. start up compressor.app
2. wait 30 seconds (seriously!.. unless you can determine that all the qmaster stuff has started.
3. use the Compressor.app | "Compressor" application menu | "Reset Background Processing..." - this could take a few mins depending on your host.
4. in Lion OSX 10.7.2, use your pen/track pad (or mouse thing) and hover over the COMPRESSOR.app icon in the dock. Then right gear down / control+click/ two fingers/ right mouse button on the COMPRESSOR.icon and see ifthere are any ACTIVE SERVICES there for a cluster. (Its likethe old compressor v3.5 in the meu bar that is not there in compressor v4)... what no tasks??? well then do the follow.. in fact do the following anyway...
5. use the Compressor.app | "Compressor" application menu | Apple Qmaster | Share this Computer | to get up the Qmaster Prerences... and do the following
6. in the setup tab uncheck both the Rendering and Compressor tick boxes. DONT UNTICK THE "SHARE THIS COMPUTER".. yet.. you will do this next. This step gracefully shutdown the rendered and compressor subtasks.Reply oK and your password....then
7. in the go back into the QMaster prefs as above and in the setup tab uncheck "share this computer". This seems toterminte the qmaster task. reply ok and your password. NO qmaster should be mostly shitdown except the controller I beleiev.
8. now QUIT compressor.app
9. IN this step, please move or DELETE the your-home-directory/Library/Application Support/Apple Qmaster folder (~/Library/Application Support/Apple Qmaster). Qmaster will rebuild this.. no worries!
10. restart/Launch Compressor.app V4
11. use the Compressor.app | "Compressor" application menu | Apple Qmaster | Share this Computer & go in and resetup your cluster. Under options setthe number of compressor instances to this rule of thumb compressor instances = rounddown(Amount of RAM in GB / 2) ... this is used for SEGMENTED TRANSCODING (use segmenting). If you dont need Rendering (Shake Maya, Nuke) then leave Rendering unchecked. YOu can use a Quickcluster howevere I've found for me and others that a managed cluster (use Apple Qadministrator.app) seems peculiarly more reliable... beats me.
12. now take a breath for 30 secs to a minute.... wait for Qmaster to get up an running.... then.
13. in Compressor.app, Mount the cluster storage .. (+shIft+M). Now this is a good test. IF THE CLUSTER NAME COMES UP IN THE LIST it means THAT THE CLUSTER infrastucture is working.... no please be patient here.. this could take a minute or two.. depending on your system.. and also do
14. in Lion OSX 10.7.2, use your pen/track pad (or mouse thing) and hover over the COMPRESSOR.app icon in the dock. Then right gear down / control+click/ two fingers/ right mouse button on the COMPRESSOR.icon and see ifthere are any ACTIVE SERVICES there for a cluster. You should see the number of compressor services to be the number of instances you specified earlier in step 11.
15. now... add a movie and try to submit the batch to the cluster. Hopefully the submit button will not be greyed out. (DONT SUBMIT FROM FCPX just yet..... just add a job a movie in Compressor to see if it works).

Summary: yo hav cleaned out compressor's state information and by using the steps 13 and 14 you can be assured that the cluster is there. DOnt rely too much on teh Share Monitor.app.. it seems to break a bit...

post your results

Warwick

Hong Kong

Hey Warwick,

thanks a lot for your advice on this. This routine kept my Quickcluster going for a while until today. I've tried lot's of steps from other posts which involved re-installing Compressor three times.

What worked for me was to simply point the /ClusterStorage in the Advanced Service Settings back to the system drive. (I had it set to my internal RAID which worked perfectly for months)

Managed Cluster is also up and running again!

So far - problem solved for me.

Thanks,

Tom

Oh no, and one day later it doesn't work anymore - again...

Sorry for the false alarm - problem persists.

Hi tom, just saw both of your last posts. Firstly good news that it is/was working. This procedure or similar generally resolves issue with the current Qmaster because most of the stability issues seem to be related to the state information maintained about jobs etc in those ~/library/application support/Qmaster etc. just cleaning this out and kicking off Qmaster and doing the same on other Qmaster nodes fixes any issues MOST OF THE TIME. It's reliable.. You could even write an AppleScript app to do it !!!! :)!(hmmm nice idea...)

Frankly old memes/wives tales of deleting compressor.app preferences and reinstalling or using 3rd party products that remove preferences in compressor 4 generally wont work to resolve the issues you and other like me have had.

Having said that, if your Qmaster cluster is unstable, also look at the logs and see if there any network whining from Qmaster and "raccoon" et al. See if there are errors in handshaking between the nodes.. Simply make these stable.

Additionally, maker sure ALL file systems used for your transcoding jobs are mounted on all your nodes... Yeah I know that the "Qmaster Copy To Cluster storage " should do this under the bonnet, however aid the file systems are accessible to source and dest /target when a job after a job is running, sometime, the job won't resume or restart under Qmaster Nd the remains are left in the structure (above) seemingly leading to a buggered cluster. Restoring it won't clean it up in a lot of cases.. Need to wipe it and the state info out!, as u did..

Generally I place a cluster storage on a fast shared file system and not on the startup root file system.. Besides unless you exclude the Qmaster storage from your ~/library/application support and storage from Timemachine, it will backup GB's of junk you can recreate or don't want.... It's also a copy operation inthestudio Qmaster transcode operation between nodes...

If you have time between client jobs, have a look through the system logs and the Qmaster controller, cluster etc logs and look for errors. Post these like sin this thread of u like.

The Qmaster component is pretty good when it's stable..

FWIW, Avoid the quickcluster for many nodes if u can.. and try your managed cluster again.. Use Qmaster administrator To up...

Mines been stable for ages however if there's a LAN / network glitch or a Mac mini needs to be kicked over , then I may have to follow the procedure above to get the cluster back..

It doesn't take long. I can even do this remotely from this iPad when I'm on the MTR going home!! Lol

Post your results for others to see.

Cheers.

Warwick

this solved my File Agent Not Found issue. Thanks.

Hi Stingray, thats good thatthis procedure helped. Keep it handy. It solves 90% of all Qmaster issues. You dont need any third party software or other voodoo.😉

BR

warwick

Hey Warwick.

Haven't heard from you in ages. Hope all is good.

Russ

Hey Russ!, thanks for asking, I've been in South America for 5 weeks... 🙂

w

Warwick – back to you

My desktop has been in the shop for a display replacement. Got it back today and went to submit a de-intrelacing job…and guess what? The dreaded None in the Cluster dialogue box. (BTW, C3.5 still worked.)

No problem, I thought. and confidently began employing every single fix that I've advised others on this forum to use, without success. Then – after running out of ideas – reinstalled; but still no joy; tried restore from Time Machine, but again, nothing.

Finally – remembered your instructions to trash the Qmaster folder in Application Support and came back to this thread to make sure I got all the steps right. Bingo! Back in business.

I owe you.

Russ

I have the File Agent Not Found problem.

I'm trying to follow the instructions above, but I can't find the directory/Library/Application Support/Apple Qmaster folder. Is it a hidden file? How do I find it?

I'm running OS 10.8 if that matters.

Thanks!

The user library is hidden; the path in Warwick's instructions begins with the public library.

Sorry, that's wrong/

Russ

Hello Russ--

I found it. I'm not sure why I had so much trouble finding it.

I followed Warwick's instructions above and got things working again. I'm still not sure if I have my Qmaster settings right, but I'm going to post a separate post about that now.

Had a Mothers Day gathering to attend to and have been running back and forth. So…I assume you're referring to Warwick's steps in his Jan 21st post in this thread.

In 10.7 and 10,8 the User Library can be accessed in the Finder by holding down the option key when clicking on Go in the menu toolbar. Library will be one of the options listed.

I think that the File Agent Not Found problem can be cured just by opening up Qmaster settings, turning off sharing, closing it and then turning it back on. (At least that's what I recall I have done when it's happened to me.) But, since that's also on Warwick's list, you might as well do everything.'

Let us know what happens.

Russ