Hey guys, this is Eric from www.finalcutstudioschool.com and I'm here with the compressor tutorial this time. You won’t find many of this on the web but I'm trying to help you out. This one I want to show you how to set up a virtual render farm, a cluster, a virtual cluster. We can't really do what within xn network because you need several Mac and some pretty hefty IT guys that know what you're doing. But we can set up a virtual cluster if your Mac has 248 or however main course.
Now a lot of people would tell you, “Now, there's only best to do this if you have 8-Core Mac or at least the 4-Core Mac” but I disagree in my experience, you can do it as long as you have more than one core. So how you do this is make sure you have compressor installed and Qmaster, which comes with Final Cut Studio 2. Go to your system preferences and so we have your system preferences pane, right here is Apple Qmaster, select that.
Now—hold on second let me hide compressor. Okay, now we have opened our systems preferences pane we selected Qmaster. This brings up our set up and our advance tab and we’re going to stick to our set up. We’re not going to full with our advance tab yet. So we’re going to stay within our set up tab. This is what it’s going to look like in your case. Everything is going to be and make sure it’s unlock, and it’s not and everything will be adjustable.
What you want to select is services only. Now, there's other ways to set up cluster with this other like QuickCluster. A QuickCluster with services can also be done. But we’re going to stick to the basics, services only. Now, the reason why we can't set up a proper render farm is because of licensing within Final Cut Studio and it will look at each one of this course as a separate machine and it will be expecting a serial number from each of these cores thinking it’s a separate machine and it will see that there's only one serial number and it will cause a problem.
So we have to do it this way. So select services only and go down to your services and check the one box shared services and don’t check the manage box we don’t want manage and service but we just going to select our share box. And this also help share distribute rendering to but with shaking stuff and we’re not going to do that because we’re not full in hit right now. So check services only and turn on your share check box for compressor.
Then under options for selected services this will bring up your cores. I have a quad core Mac and if you have a Octo Core Mac they’ll be eight list instances listed. In my case I'm a quad core so I have four instances listed. Now, what will happen is before you even set up this virtual cluster I recommend you have at least two gig of ram per instance so if you have four gigs of ram, I mean four cores, I recommend at least four gigs of ram. You want at least a gig per core. I recommend eight gigs which will give two gigs for instance. But you want at least one gig per instance which means one gig per core. If you don’t have at least one gig per core I wouldn’t recommend setting up a virtual cluster because you'll start paging out, you'll start going to virtual memory which means you're going to start accessing the hard drive and you're going to bring things to a screeching halt.
And the reason I have three instances checked instead of four—if I check four it would mean it would send one instance to each core, one instance per core. But this is almost one instance per core, it’s one point something because I'm using three instances and the reason for that is because if you use four instances you'll think to yourself well, three is great, four must be awesome, it must rock. No, it will most undoubtedly un-rock because if you use four if you have a quad core or eight, if you have octo core you are going to slow things down massively because you are not going to have the bandwidth to take care of what your sending out and what your doing and also you won’t have any processor left if you want to do anything else why this things working. You want to leave something free.
So if you have an octo core Mac set it to four instances, if you have a quad core Mac set it to three instances, if you have dual core Mac set it to two instances you'll be fine. So set your instances and hit ok then go down here to the bottom and click start sharing. And this will start your virtual cluster. Now, I want to go fire up compressor. Now with our compressor you might be looking at this layout thing is different than yours, it is different I like when layout like this but it’s the exact same thing windows might be in different spot.
I want to bring in a file and there's several ways of bringing in the file I can go to add file here, right here I can go open a target and I can—I go open a job and add new job or I can just drag and drop into this little box here, so that’s what I'm going to do, I'm going to drug my movie, get my movie and drag it in and just drop it right there. Now, as you can see what this does this will bring up a preview here in the preview window down here as you can see.
Now this will give you that before—you see this little slide right here, this little slide will give you before and after. If you—I don’t have a codec selected but if you have a codec selected they’ll be a little red line, it would be before my compression and after my compression so I can compare.
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