Struggling to activate QMaster for faster Compressor

Hi Reelsick (love your business name!). HELP IS ON ITS WAY (Little River Band 1979) This symptom is easy to rectifiy. NO NEED for any third party apps and nothing to do with compressor.app itself.

Simply you need to REMOVE all the QMASTER state information.

Here's a detailed link at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3197005?answerId=21309544022#21309544022 ... look at the 3rd post down... detailed instrucrtions/procesure.. easy.

Basically is you remove | purge | delete all things in ~/Library/Application Support/Apple Qmaster/ after you have shut down QMASTER , QMASTER will restart ok

BTW.. theres loads of tips on this on these forums however there is NO NEED at all for any 3rd party apps, nor resinstallation of compressor nor messing with compressor.app prefs.. yeah it may have helped some but the issues is qmaster.

Try these procesures at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3197005?answerId=21309544022#21309544022 , it usually works for my colleagues and myself.

Oh btw, you might find COMPRESSOR.app more responsive when adding a batch if the PREVIEW window is closed. Simply it seems to avoid building a oeview and submission is faster for a lot of jobs.. (old R.O.T but worth mentioning).

Compressor.app is great.. just need to coax it a bit.😊

Post your results for others to see.

HTH

Warwick

Hong Kong

(Click on images to enlarge.)

In Compressor make sure 'Allow Job Segmenting' is check. If it not checked this will not work.

If you are not sending the finial video to the web turn off fast start. Streaming: None

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Compressor Menu---> Apple QMaster---> Share This Computer.

Notice that under QuickCluster the identifying name is Dave's. You'll select this when submitting the job in Compressor. (Your name will be different.)

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Click on the Compressor options button to bring this widow up.

I have a 27" i7 4 core iMac. 4 cores = 8 Threads. So I set this to 4 instances. I can go up to 8 but, this doesn't add to the speed when rendering the job. In fact this can add time to the rendering time.

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Submitting the job:

Click the Sumit button--->

From the drop down menu pick the QuickCluster identifier name that I mention above.

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Open the Share Monitor window.

Click on the QuickCluster name to see the rendering process. Done.

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This is how I use the Activity Monitor App to see how the computer is processing the video.

Activity Monitor Menu---> Window---> CPU Usage window (and pick to keep this on top).

You'll have 4 compressord open. I usually get around 180% CPU usage per compressord. The 5th one is for 'This Computer' and won't be used.

Click on the Rendering button in the Qmaster window. Remove all but one 'This Computer' from the window.

are you usiing MANAGED clusters or a simple quickcluster? IF the former, just go in to Qmaster Administratar.app and purge (remove) all the clusters then simply define a new custer controller and add the nodes.

2) you can simply adjust the number of instances through compressor.app menus Apple Qmaster/share this computer/setup tab.

1. stop qmaster "untick "share computer"
2. adust the instances form hte list box near "compressor"a
3. start qmaster again "TICK shre thsi computer"

ALso a good tip form DAve about job segmenting. Also unless you need to make syre that FRM CONTROLS is set to OFF. Some people have their default apple presets to INITIATE FRAME CONTROLS.. thisis very CPU intensive.. loke seriously intensive and will prolong the job's elapsed greatly... simply turn it off for that job in the inpsector

oh lastly,, just note that sometime the STATUS displays foro SHARE MONITOR.app, and Qmaster Administrator.app etc may be slow. Its all socket driven and get a bit confused at times. You'll see loads of whinging in the /var/logs. by them both. You will see this also exhibited in eth HISTORY UI of COmpressor.app.. yep it gets out of whack. GLadly it does right itself after time.

post your results for others to see.

w

CompressorTranscoderX is basically the same thing as compressord. I have Compressor 3.5 and that maybe the reason my CompressorTranscoderX is named compressord.

You should only have 4 CompressorTranscoderX. Change your instances to 4 if you have a 4 core computer. Each video segment will use 1 core and 1 hyper-thread. If you have 8 instances chosen. The video will be broken up into 16 segment. It will take more time to join the 16 segments together compared to 8 segments.

Just a quick comment to add to the excellent help you're getting.

Over time, everyone's system becomes unique in some important way – even if we start out buying precisely the same model, OS, and so forth. And so we should not be surprised when seemingly identical symptoms end up requiring somewhat different fixes.

In my case I've got one foot in the FCS environment and the other in the FCPX environment. By and large, both C4 and C3.5 coexist nicely and the results I get are predictable. That's no small thing because they are essential and are used just about every day.

But…every now and then (perhaps a couple of times a month) my Quick Cluster will go missing; it simply won't be available as an option…or even more disconcerting, I'll see the dreaded None in the Submit dialogue window. Typically, if C4 gives me None for cluster options, C 3.5 will be affected as well…perhaps offering This Computer but no QuickCluster option – and so forth.

I'm not a real tech-savvy guy so my reponse to these "surprises" has been developed over time by trial and error. With both versions, I start by shutting down sharing – from the Qmaster menu in C4 and from Systems Prefs in the case of C3.5. Then I close out C, reopen and start up Sharing. Often I have to close and re-open the application once more to get everything working as it should. This usually works, although I've had some occasions where I had to use Digital Rebellion's Compressor Repair. It's a great tool and I've often recommended it to others who are having Compressor-Qmaster issues.

So I guess I'm doing more or less what Warwick was suggesting.

And to David's explanation of TranscoderX terminology, here are rwo screen shots in AM of the same segmented job – one in C3.5 amd the other in C4.

Good luck.

Russ

Reelsick Productions wrote:

IT BLOODY WORKED!!!!!!!

That's great. But which step made the secret sauce?🙂

Russ

I have test all combination for how many Instances to choose from and 4 is about the right number.

When you say 98% for your CPU usage. Are you saying 98% for the total CPU usage? Or for 98% for each CompressorTranscoderX process. 98% is right for total CPU usage. 98% for each CompressorTranscoderX process is to low. If so, codec are you transcoding too?

If you have this widow open in the Activty Monitor. Are all 8 indicators pegged out?

and this...

If you are looking at this...

and reading 98%. It is the same as my example above... this is correct too. All of this indecates that the Qmaster is doing it's job and working correctly.

My computer specs...

3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB

2TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive

AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5

Basically the same as your.