Hi folks,
I hope I'm posting this in the right place! And I'm sorry if it's been answered before, but a search didn't yield me anything on the forum. I know that I'm way behind the times with my setup, but it works for me, and I was able to get it on the cheap, haha...I've been troubled by the fact that lately, Compressor has been using only 1 core of the 8 that I have available. I've switched to MPEG Streamclip for now for some conversions, because as of right now, it's using ~5 cores and running like a champion. My question is this:

I have followed the tutorials online to the T, I think, with regard to setting up QMaster to create a local cluster, so that in theory, it can spawn a new instance of Compressor for each core that I allot to it. However, in practice, I'm having an issue. My interface looked slightly different than the ones on the tutorial, either due to the fact that they're on OS 10.6 and I'm on 10.7.5, or something, or because I updated FCS from the original version 7 to the slightly modified one Apple released later. But it should still work? I went into the QMaster preference pane and tried adding different numbers of local computer instances. I started with 8, which didn't work, and also tried 7 and 4 (I read that Apple only recommends using half your available cores for this if you don't have a computer that supports multithreading). I created the virtual cluster, started sharing, and made sure to submit the job from Compressor with the unmanaged services checkbox checked. However, still only one instance of Compressor spawns, and only uses one core. Obviously this is frustrating, since there's so much computing power that's going unused.

I wonder if anyone else has encountered this issue, and if so, if they have a fix for it? The only thing I can think of right now is that I've read that some codecs don't support multiple cores, but I was converting an AVCHD MTS file wrapped in a .mov wrapper into ProRes 422, and I would think that that stuff would be common enough to support multiple cores, hopefully? Anyway, sorry for the long post, and I hope everyone's staying safe and healthy!

Cheers,
Ben