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Fred Turner Author

Level 1

89 points

Qmaster 3.5.3 conflict with OS X 10.9 Mavericks

A client of mine who'd just upgraded to Mavericks asked me today about an error trying to set up Qmaster 3.5.x from Final Cut Studio to do some batch processing. The error message comes up after System Preferences re-opens in 32-bit mode to open the Qmaster PrefPane and says simply:

Preferences Error

Could not load Apple Qmaster preference pane.

I tried reproducing this on my systems and sure enough, with fresh installations of Qmaster 3.5, then updated to v3.5.3 w/ ProApps Update 2010-02, I got the same error on a 10.9 Mavericks system while I had no such trouble on a 10.8.5 Mountain Lion system. This may be a slight hiccup for those of us interested in continuing to use Final Cut Studio but wanting to upgrade to newer OSes.

Can anyone else verify or offer a workaround?

Thanks,

Fred

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 9:46 PM

44 replies

Nov 11, 2013 12:26 PM in response to chiefroastbeef

I second the post above. Been trying for ages but it seems Apple have shut the door on Compressor from FCS3.

Used FCS Remover and removed all traces of 3.5.3, installed 4.0.7 and now I have all multicore functionailty back.

Nov 12, 2013 1:32 PM in response to chiefroastbeef

chiefroastbeef wrote:

For people that are still trying to figure out how to use Compress 3.5 with Mavericks, just buy Compressor 4 and be done with it. Qmaster works great with C4 in Mavericks, all cores are encoding at 90%+.

Yep, although we didn't understand it, Apple did us a favor for not letting as know that 10.9 will brake Compressor3.5.

Benny11

Level 1

100 points

Nov 12, 2013 5:11 PM in response to Toke Lahti

Oh, I don't know about that. I really haven't been wholly impressed by Mavericks. And as an editor, compressor is a daily use application for me. I read a bunch of the lacklustre reviews on C4, but perhaps your experiences have been better?

Last night I took the plunge, used FCP Remover to ditch Compressor 3 and purchased Compressor 4. Now I've only done some preliminary encoding today, using a quick cluster setup on my 2012 imac...and watching the cores in Activity Monitor, I am not rendering at 90%. It seems like 40%. And it still seems like 'qmasterd' and 'CompressorTranscoderX' are permanently hung up in compressor.

Am I missing something?

Nov 12, 2013 5:57 PM in response to Benny11

Are your setting like this? With the Number of Instances matching whatever your CPU is.

These are my settings and I compress at 100% on all 8 cores.

Nov 12, 2013 6:01 PM in response to Posthumous

I always set mine to one below how many cores I have, just so I leave some CPU power for the machine itself.

Benny11

Level 1

100 points

Nov 12, 2013 6:12 PM in response to Posthumous

Fantastic. Thanks. I didn't catch that in my setup. I'll adjust and do some further testing. 😉

Benny11

Level 1

100 points

Nov 13, 2013 9:27 AM in response to Benny11

Happy to report all cores are firing away beautifully now.

Fred Turner Author

Level 1

89 points

Nov 14, 2013 9:37 PM in response to Benny11

Wow, thanks for such an active and informative discussion, guys! I finally got a chance to get back around to tinkering w/ this on the same machine that sparked my initial post. Taking a cue from Studio X's & Benny11's mention of Terminal commands, I was able to get Qmaster 3.5.3 working on a Mavericks system, despite being unable to run the Sys Prefs pane. I used this test system as a services node added to a cluster, and verified that it was indeed "blowin' and goin'" on both cores to assist.

While I suppose I could purchase and upgrade to Compressor 4, there are a couple of reasons I can think of not to:

I have several systems that I like to run as "Services only" nodes. Using Compressor 3.5/FCS3 on the main station allows me to rope these other nodes in for cluster processing w/o having to install the full Compressor on the nodes.
I'm not sure if it's possible to just install as a node w/ C4. However, this may not be necessary-- one may just install the full C4 on every system one owns, then configure the services available...I'll leave that to others to confirm.
I like to get the most out of old machines, including in my setup, a Quad 2.5GHz G5 that's still got a lot of oomph. I doubt that Qmaster/Compressor v4 would interface and communicate properly w/ an older Qmaster that runs on PPC machines. Again, if anyone can confirm or deny, I'd be interested to know.

For anyone else looking to make Qmaster 3.5 work w/ Mavericks, drop into Terminal and type:

qmasterprefs -help

to see all the different options available (most of which closely match their PrefPane counterpart); and:

qmasterprefs -list

to see the current configuration of your system. I found it helpful to run the latter command on a <10.9 system that had the settings how I wanted, just to compare and verify what I was setting on the 10.9 machine.

Thanks,

Fred

Nov 15, 2013 8:28 AM in response to jm_aivi

Configuring QmasterPrefs by command line is not so complicated:

UserName$ qmasterprefs -help

Usage: qmasterprefs options

-help (print supported options)

-list (print current settings)

-resetCluster [cancelJobs] (reset cluster and optionally cancel queued jobs)

-allowBonjourDiscovery on|off -sharingType servicesOnly | servicesAndCluster | servicesAndQuickCluster (see startSharing)

-startSharing [servicesOnly | servicesAndCluster | servicesAndQuickCluster] (start qmaster services)

-stopSharing (stop qmaster services)

-restart (restart qmaster services)

-reset (reset qmaster services)

-launchContentAgent on|off (launch content agent at start-up)

-log [0-5] | [truncate on|off] (set "global log level" | "truncate logs")

-statusMenu on|off (show service status in menu bar)

-service name options [-service name options ...] (set service options):

Nov 17, 2013 2:10 PM in response to jdweekley

Unfortunately not everyone is experienced in Terminal. Although I can see what the choices are I can't seem to get the correct syntax to set the options. It would help the non-experienced Terminal user if someone could post a list of commands that could be cut and pasted (though it may require minor editting for the number of cores available) into Terminal to maximize performance.

Studio X

Level 7

27,229 points

Nov 17, 2013 3:54 PM in response to Martin Pace

Go to the Qmaster help files and read through the section regarding terminal.

You will discover that various scenarios have been developed with the proper syntax.

Nov 18, 2013 11:29 AM in response to Studio X

I read the thread and did go both to the Qmaster manual, help files, and the help in Terminal. The help files show commands like

which are the same as the manual for Qmaster. The help in Terminal shows this

which is the almost the same format as the help files except with more options listed and slightly different formatting (no < > for parameter options).

I fiddled around for a couple of hours trying to figure out what mistake I was making that resulted in all the invalid argument error messages only to find out that now my computer takes 10 times longer to compress a video file. So then I had to spend even more time locating the appropriate plist files and restoring them from backups to get the system back to where it was before I started.

If it's so easy to configure from the command line why can't someone spend five minutes to post the correct commands to paste into Terminal to optimize performance so that other users don't have to go through what I went through? Telling soomeone to essentially "read the manual" is not very helpful.