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Izzy Video 140 – Turbocharge Your Compression!

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Want to know how to speed up video compression? The week’s members-only tutorial is for those of you who: 1) Use Compressor to transcode videos, and 2) Have more than one core in your computer’s processor.

Many of the recent Macs have more than one processor on their motherboard. This means that you have a lot of potential processing power at your disposal, but not everyone knows how to take full advantage of it. When you do a lot of video compression, it helps to save some time, and in this week’s tutorial, I show you step-by-step how to set up your Mac to maximize video compression using Compressor. This can dramatically speed up the time it takes to transcode video.

It also shows you iStat Menu, an interesting tool you can use to monitor the processors.

This week’s video is only available to members, but I’ll release another free one next week.

Thanks for watching!

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  • Kevin

    WHAT?!? I thought the newest MacPro only had 8 cores. Ahh, I see, HyperThreading. I am so jealous of your 16 CPU graph.

    Anyway, I wanted to point out that you aren’t maxing out your cores, and I think that is because you set up your QuickCluster, but then you aren’t actually using it when you submitted your batch in Compressor.

    If, when you go to submit your compressor batch, you choose the name of your QuickCluster instead of “This Computer”, I think you might end up with faster renders.

    Unfortunately, this is a buggy thing under Leopard (it always worked perfectly under TIger). The name of the cluster might not show up, and you might need to stop/start your Qmaster sharing. A trick I found works well is to stop sharing, change the name the QuickCluster by even just one letter, and start it again.

    Maybe try this on your 16 CPU box and see if it takes all your CPU graphs right to the top?

  • Kevin

    WHAT?!? I thought the newest MacPro only had 8 cores. Ahh, I see, HyperThreading. I am so jealous of your 16 CPU graph.

    Anyway, I wanted to point out that you aren’t maxing out your cores, and I think that is because you set up your QuickCluster, but then you aren’t actually using it when you submitted your batch in Compressor.

    If, when you go to submit your compressor batch, you choose the name of your QuickCluster instead of “This Computer”, I think you might end up with faster renders.

    Unfortunately, this is a buggy thing under Leopard (it always worked perfectly under TIger). The name of the cluster might not show up, and you might need to stop/start your Qmaster sharing. A trick I found works well is to stop sharing, change the name the QuickCluster by even just one letter, and start it again.

    Maybe try this on your 16 CPU box and see if it takes all your CPU graphs right to the top?

  • http://www.izzyvideo.com Izzy

    Kevin,

    Excellent feedback. I appreciate the additional clarification. I’ll try it on a render later today and report back.

    This is another reason I like our community so much. All of us is smarter than one of us! :-)

  • http://www.izzyvideo.com Izzy

    Kevin,

    Excellent feedback. I appreciate the additional clarification. I’ll try it on a render later today and report back.

    This is another reason I like our community so much. All of us is smarter than one of us! :-)

  • http://www.devia.be/ Stefaan Lesage

    Hi Izzy,

    Great tutorial. I wrote an article about just that on our company website a while ago (http://www.devia.be/news/article/setting-up-a-virtual-cluster-to-speed-up-compressor/). From the feedback I received apparently the new MacPro Octo’s can have up to 16 instances of compressor. That made me quite jealous :-(

    Regards,

    Stefaan

  • http://www.devia.be/ Stefaan Lesage

    Hi Izzy,

    Great tutorial. I wrote an article about just that on our company website a while ago (http://www.devia.be/news/article/setting-up-a-virtual-cluster-to-speed-up-compressor/). From the feedback I received apparently the new MacPro Octo’s can have up to 16 instances of compressor. That made me quite jealous :-(

    Regards,

    Stefaan

  • http://www.devia.be/ Stefaan Lesage

    Oh, wait a minute, I actually use a slightly different approach. I am using a QuickCluster with services, and if I do so, I get 2 options when submitting a batch of work to compressor, one is MyComputer and the other one is the name of my virtual render cluster.

    I know at the time I did some testing / benchmarking (results are in my article as well). Maybe I should try your approach and see if it makes any difference.

    Regards,

    Stefaan

  • http://www.devia.be/ Stefaan Lesage

    Oh, wait a minute, I actually use a slightly different approach. I am using a QuickCluster with services, and if I do so, I get 2 options when submitting a batch of work to compressor, one is MyComputer and the other one is the name of my virtual render cluster.

    I know at the time I did some testing / benchmarking (results are in my article as well). Maybe I should try your approach and see if it makes any difference.

    Regards,

    Stefaan

  • http://www.avartisanproductions.com Greg

    I can’t get over how cool all these tutorials are!
    When I go into Qmaster and set everything up as described, the “options for selected service” stays hidden. I can’t even get to the scroll bar to see the instances so I’m stuck at 1 instance. Does this have anything to do with being only a core 2 duo? Only when I also activate the “Shake and other shell…” does the “options…” button allow to be opened. But then it just takes me to a list of service instances which isn’t what I want…
    Help?
    (I can’t continue to wait 4 hours to compress a 6 min clip!)

  • http://www.avartisanproductions.com Greg

    I can’t get over how cool all these tutorials are!
    When I go into Qmaster and set everything up as described, the “options for selected service” stays hidden. I can’t even get to the scroll bar to see the instances so I’m stuck at 1 instance. Does this have anything to do with being only a core 2 duo? Only when I also activate the “Shake and other shell…” does the “options…” button allow to be opened. But then it just takes me to a list of service instances which isn’t what I want…
    Help?
    (I can’t continue to wait 4 hours to compress a 6 min clip!)