Distributed Encoding
 

I tried to hook my G4 and G5 together for the purpose of aiding render times with compressor. When I sent my first batch out I got a messsage telling me that I needed to have another copy of DVDSP on my G4.

Do I really need to buy another license for DVDSP???

Lewis

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Fear is Faith it Won't Work Out

That might be very possible. But before you continue, to what format are you
rendering? If it is DVD/MPEG-2 I doubt you can do distributed encoding. As far
as I know, no consumer/pro-sumer (not even sure if there is such a thing for
the professional) software has that feature. The reason being that MPEG
encoding stores the differences between frames (both forwards and backwards),
it can't do this if frames are compressed by different machines.

In theory they could share information on this. But what happens if some
machines are faster than others etc. etc. This quickly becomes a programming
nightmare.

I would be really suprised (and very impressed) if compresssor / DVDSP supports
distributed DVD/MPEG-2 encoding!

Compressor 2 does support this. You can check out the specs on Apple's website, where it claims that you can do MPEG-2 encodes on a network. It runs through Qmaster 2, which was, I believe, developed for Shake (definitely a pro app). I think if you don't have a SAN, you have to have copies of the file you're encoding on each machine. Lewis, could this be the problem you're having?

Edit: or maybe it's only supported in DVDSP4 for background encoding and not for Compressor 2. I can't remember.

Interesting Zach. I will drill Apple for information at this weekends IBC event
here in Amsterdam.