Does a QMaster Cluster really make sense for Final Cut Server?

Question

Correct me if I'm wrong, and I often am, but my understanding of the difference between setting up a "Cluster" and just using "This Machine" is the cluster allows multiple jobs to be processed simultaneously, while an unmanaged system will only do one job at a time. However, when it does that one job, it uses all the system's processors.
Yesterday I created a cluster consisting of two Quad Core Intel systems, and started Final Cut Server cataloging about a half a TB of data. I noticed that Server submits the Proxy render jobs one at a time, and that the jobs were being submitted to only one processor core, in a rotating fashion. Is there a way to make FCServer submit jobs in "parallel," or am I better off with using just the local system for transcoding?

Answer 1

The default proxy transcode setting seems to be specifically tuned to work at a small scale, which makes sense if you are asking a box to host the database, serve the app, and do all the proxy transcodes. I observed the same phenomenon, so I made my own transcode setting for proxies and I chose to lower the bitrate a bit to help with file size and transfer time. The upside is the floodgates are wide open when my 32 core Xeon cluster (four 8-cores) goes to town on a proxy encoding job.
Your other observation is also right, that only one item is encoded at a time across the cluster rather than working on all of them at once across the cluster. So what you get with a fast cluster is shorter encode time, not parallel encodings that all finish at the same time.
If you have the spare machines to dedicate to cluster work, I strongly endorse setting up that way. I would not recommend Quick Clusters for Final Cut Server encoding duty. Either set up a dedicated Managed Cluster that FCSvr can use or none at all.