How can I get more rendering power, short buying another Mac?
 

Working on a laptop. I was wondering if there was any way to get more rendering power in Final Cut Pro - perhaps by doing distributed computing or hooking it up to a render farm or something...

What I'd like to do is somehow hook the Mac up to a Beowulf cluster - is there any way that this can be done?

As far as I know, you can't do it unfortunately. Compressor and Shake support distributed rendering - but not Final Cut Pro. Sorry!

What about with Compressor?

Sure! You can do distributed rendering with Compressor and Shake using QMaster. Just look in the documentation that comes with Compressor on how to set it all up...

Right, but do I have to buy additional macs for that or can I build a monster PC or bank of PCs running Linux and render that way?

Good question! I know there is some kind of QMaster-type software that runs on Linux that takes care of the rendering for the Linux version of Shake. I'm not sure if it's compatible with the latest Mac version of QMaster or the Final Cut Studio suite however...

Hopefully someone else can clear this up?