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When you find yourself doing multiple compressions in Apple's Compressor, it's an important thing to remember to set the software preferences to use as many intel processing cores that you can allow it in crunching your data. This is especially helpful if you are ecoding H.264 files in High Definition resolutions. Thankfully, with the Apple Qmaster, you can control the number of core processing units assigned to Compressor.

Over the years, I have setup many Final Cut Studio workstations and will usually forget to enable the some 4-8 processing cores that are inherently available with the speedy INTEL XEON processors found inside the Mac Pro workstations. This is a great feature that is typically overlooked by newcomers to the Final Cut Studio suite.

You can easily assign mega amounts of super-computing power according to your needs for Compressor. For example, if you have a render that isn't time-sensitive, you can assign as few as 1-2 cores to the rendering of that content while you still leave other cores available for editing, dvd authoring, graphic design...you get the idea. In another situation, you may need to crunch a render out in a jiffy. In this situation, you could assign all your cores to this task, knowing that it will slow down other activities on your Mac. This is a good time to go and do all the things you can never do because you are always glued to your computer, like, let the sun touch your skin, and breath air that hasn't been ingested and filtered by an Apple Computer.

Go to System Preferences and click on Apple Qmaster:

Click on Options for selected service, this is where you will enable as many processors in your QuickCluster as your heart desires, well at least as many as your machine has.

And assign the processing cores you want your Mac to dedicate to Compressor.

Make sure you select the right options which will basically create a virtual cluster, or a local cluster on your machine.

1. Select "QuickCluster with Services
2. Share both Compressor and Rendering
3. Make sure "Include unmanaged services from other computers" is checked
4. Give your QuickCluster a meaningful name, in this instance we will call mine "CSC Intelio Cluster."
   

When you go to submit a job, make sure you select your virtual cluster, again, in our case we named it "CSC Intelio Cluster." I'm going to go ahead and click "Submit".

You can then open up the application "Activity Monitor" found in your Apple's Application/Utility folder. This application will give you the inside scoop of what is going on in the background on your mac.

While you are in the activity monitor go to the top menu and under Window click on "CPU Usage".

You should see all of your cores crunching away at your compression job.

In your Batch Monitor, you should now see your QuickCluster, and you will be able to see your Intel Processing Cores busting a render move.

You should see a significant increase in both render and family time. I hope this small tip is useful, I know that this slips many novice editors, as they sit in stupor while their new Mac Pro renders like thick molasses pouring out of a jar.

Now if we could just have more CORES!

Christopher Clark
Solar Monkey Media