Scratch that previous bit about qmaster being easy to set up. Woke up to find all the renders had stalled, wasted a bunch of time getting the whole thing working again. Some notes:

• Traffic appears to be routed through the box that submits the jobs, so the submission machine needs to be left on the network.
• If you delete a controller, you have to reassign its slave nodes to the pool before creating a new one, else they will quietly (and invisibly) wait for the original to return.
• Compressor stores locations as relative to its current location, i.e. if you submit your batch from the box that shares the network drive none of the other nodes will be able to find the files.
• Each node needs a different serial, else you will get Quicktime Error: -50.
• The simplest setup seems to be a controller that runs Compressor (submitting the jobs), linked to another box that maintains the network volume/is a slave node. From there you can add additional slave nodes that see the network volume.

1:58 am

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.

12:57 am

There’s only two official mac raid-5 cards: the Highpoint series (which are flaky) and the NetCell, which is too new to have had much use. So I’d sorta given up on RAID-5.

And then it was pointed out to me that the XServe has a BTO RAID-5 card. Digging deeper, found that it was a LSI MegaRAID card. There’s no official mac support, but going to the terminal and typing “man megaraid” reveals Apple’s custom built CLI frontend.

Gonna hit that terabyte mark one way or another. My theory is to take this old dual G4 with Gigabit Ethernet I’ve got and pull the zip/optical drive to have room for four extra drives internally. Throw in qmaster and I’ve got distributed FCP/DSP encoding.

6:25 pm

Mmmm.

6:56 pm

Still no updates on the HVX200 front. I was hoping by now some footage would leak out. The latest semi-official word is the first (few) units should be shipping late December.

Got QMaster + network batch encoding working with Compressor. Distributed network applications are cool stuff, although hopefully stuff like Avivo will simplify the encoding process in the future. Coolness: GPGpu’s.

11:33 pm

Sexy!

7:07 pm

Nothing gets me wet quite like camera porn.

6:09 pm

Been researching ways to deal with a bunch of data, for the HVX. Looked at raid-5, the coolest implementation of which was this. But a bit of out my price range ($600 + drives), and doesn’t use any of my current stuff. So I’ll probably end up just getting a couple more hard drives and throwing them into my enclosures. Simple, effective. And towards that end I just discovered the new-and-improved disk spanning feature of Toast 7, which solves perfectly my issues of backing up gigabytes of data. Gonna have to get a whole pile of DVD disks, but I can handle that.

1:19 am

Well, I’ll be jiggered. Drop the main page rss into iTunes 5 as a new podcast and voila, it’s a new video channel!

12:34 pm

Wandering about, not finding any new HVX200 rumors, I started mucking about with Broadcast Machine when suddenly I realized it was an RSS feed generator. So then I went and modified my old scripts to generate a compatible feed.

Practical upshot? You can throw the main page rss into DTV. Everything’s the same as before, but better!

1:45 am