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Table Of Contents
- Apple Qmaster 3 User Manual
- Contents
- Welcome to Apple Qmaster
- Using Apple Qmaster 3
- The Apple Qmaster Distributed Processing System
- The Apple Qmaster Interface
- Installing Apple Qmaster, Shake, and Other Applications
- Setting Up Rendering Services and Shared Storage
- Submitting Batches for Apple Qmaster Processing
- Using Nodes Without Apple Qmaster Installed
- Setting Environment Variables in Apple Qmaster
- Using the Command Line in Apple Qmaster
- Installing Apple Qmaster from the Command Line
- Shell Commands for Configuring Service Nodes and Cluster Controllers
- Shell Commands for Submitting Apple Qmaster Jobs
- Shell Commands for Submitting Compressor Jobs
- Shell Commands for Monitoring Batches
- Using Scripts to Run Apple Qmaster, Compressor, and Batch Monitor
To use Apple Qmaster with Shake, or other frame-based rendering applications, you must
follow these installation and licensing guidelines.
• To submit batches for Shake: A copy of Shake must be installed on every node in the
cluster. For command-line rendering on Mac OS X, a license is not needed.
• To submit batches for Maya: Install and license a copy of Maya on every node in the
cluster.
• To submit batches for other frame-based rendering applications: Install a copy of the
rendering application on every node in the cluster. For example, you must install a
copy of After Effects 6.5 on every node in the cluster. It’s important that you install
aerender, the command-line renderer for After Effects. After Effects requires a product
key and serial number before installation.
Note: In all three of the above cases, you will need to install any third-party plug-ins,
fonts, and so on, that your projects require on each node in the cluster.
Setting Up Rendering Services and Shared Storage
Here are some additional tips on setting up an Apple Qmaster “render farm.”
Changing the Number of Rendering Service Instances
By default, Apple Qmaster enables one rendering service per processor. On a
dual-processor system, you will have two rendering services enabled by default. So that
means out of the box, two copies of Shake will be running at the same time on a
dual-processor system. It may be necessary to disable a rendering service. For more
information on changing the number of rendering services, see the
Distributed Processing Setup Guide, available in Apple Qmaster Help.
Note: If you are using Shake, you can always change the number of processors Shake
uses at submission time by using -cpus x, where x is the number of threads to use.
Shared Volumes
All the nodes in the cluster must have a common volume to work from; otherwise they
will not know where to find assets needed for any given batch. There are many ways to
set up file sharing. For more information, see the Mac OS X documentation on file sharing
and the Mac OS X Server documentation.
Dedicated NFS Servers
You can set up a dedicated NFS server. For more information, see the Mac OS X Server
documentation.
15Chapter 1 Using Apple Qmaster 3