Spent half an hour getting qmaster + compressor to do distributed network rendering. Good luck figuring this one out: you have to disable copying the source to the cluster in the compressor preferences to get it to use network volumes.
But anyways, got it working, set up two nodes, hit render and…only one works. Re-reading the qmaster/compressor page, it is interesting to note Apple carefully manages to not mention that while you can use it to distribute jobs, only one machine can be dedicated to each one. I.e. you can put ten tasks across a group of machines but not use ten machines to do one task. (Note the words “share”, “combine” and “segment”.)
C’est la vie. Aside from that the whole thing works pretty well. It’s nice to set something up and then be able to walk away. Doing some h.264 tests, and the codec is pretty impressive. I’m getting similar quality to my current Sorenson 3 @ 400*300, but at 640*480. The main issue is that h.264 kills older machines and requires Quicktime 7. Not entirely sure if I want to draw a line in the sand many people can’t cross.