--An oldie but a goodie, this what got me started in writing about FCS originally when I realized how hard it is to find good clear & concise info out there. Anyway, this has now been shared all over the web and in podcasts but here it is again in all its original glory --

If you’re lucky enough to have a MacPro, Quad or Octo, you’re probably not taking advantage of its real processing power. This is most true when it comes to Compressor. I kept getting so frustrated when I couldn’t get all 8 cores to get up much past 50% but with a little trick, i got them to blaze.

The trick is Virtual Clusters, essentially telling Compressor to treat your multi-core machine as several different machines, instead of just one. While your box may have all these cores, pointing them all at one frame at a time is just not that efficient, it’s too narrow of a section to use your processing power properly. Telling Q-Master to treat your machine as several instances allows Compressor to break the clips up into several pieces and assign the parts to separate processor pairs which gets you more efficient processing. For example, a clip that took 14mins 52secs to go to H.264 on one instance took only 6mins 40secs on a virtual cluster. A 2hr DV to MPEG -2 2-pass VBR to 1hr 25mins on one instance and only 44mins on a virtual cluster.

Here’s how to set it up. It’s really easy. Go to your System Preferences and click QMaster at the bottom. Hit Stop sharing at the bottom to un-lock your preferences. Leave it as a QuickCluster but under Options for Selected Service, change the instances up from 1 instance to match your machine, 2 instances for Quads and 4 for Octos.  Give it a name and hit start sharing to let Compressor know its available for processing

The next really important thing is when your in Compressor and ready to submit your batch, you submit not This Computer, but to the name you gave your Virtual Cluster.

Then when you check your Batch Monitor, click on the Cluster name and watch how it splits up your clip and processes them individually, making the most out of those cores you paid for.