Distrubuted Encoding with Apple Qmaster and Compressor
Those that have Final Cut Studio or DVD Studio 4 installed on several workstations inside their internal network can look at Apple Qmaster and Compressor as an option for distributed encoding. This is one of the cool features of having Final Cut Studio and Macs available. Now before you decide to go this route you should know that the only way you'll be happy with the speed of the encoding on your encoding cluster is to have a fast network and fast workstations.
With that said you can create a Cluster with Apple Qmaster by turning on the QuickCluster with services feature in the System preferences of the Mac OS under Apple Qmaster. This option is only available for those with Final Cut Studio or DVD Studio Pro 4. Using Compressor you can send jobs to the cluster instead of to Compressor on your Desktop workstation. The workstations in the cluster can gang up on your videos to encode your output files which is very cool stuff. For example, when you send your Batch to your cluster each node in your cluster is used to process the videos which means encoding should be completed quicker. You even have the ability to check the status of your encoding on the cluster through the Batch Monitor on your client computer. A possible scenario is to have editing happening during the day and encoding going on overnight or when editing is not happening.
