Well it seemed as I reached the end of the tests I did for High Noon Compression Tests I had not tortured myself enough. There were still some potential scenarios that I thought I could quickly check off the list and give myself some peace of mind. If you read the results from those tests, peace of mind is probably far out of reach.

Throughout the tests I was viewing the activity monitor and at no point was I ever near using all of the 3 GB of RAM, so I wanted to see if I could run multiple compressions and speed this game up at all in the event of a fire drill with files needed, Stat. So I ran both Compressor and MPEG StreamClip at the same time to see if they would spit seeds faster.

Round 6: 60 sec 1920 x 1080 ProRes 422 (HQ)

Compressor                                         48 min 03 sec        10.4 MB

MPEG StreamClip                                 47 min 44 sec        20.4 MB

So basically, this was another fail. Going back to the ~20 min result that both programs had individually, this method only slowed the process down even more. I could have used either one and run 2 consecutive compression jobs in less time than running both programs at once.

Even though I pretty much gave up on the virtual cluster compressions, I decided to give it another crack. This time I ran one file through compressor normally and, at the same time, sent another through compressor using the virtual cluster. So now 2 files were compressing at the same time in the batch monitor rather than waiting in line. For this one I reverted back to the 30 second clips because I was getting sick of checking all these long compressions.

Round 7: 30 sec 1920 x 1080 ProRes 422 (HQ)

Compressor                                         22 min 08 sec        4.8 MB

Compressor Virtual Cluster (VC)           26 min 58 sec        5.8 MB

Again, this was a fail because it again came out 6 minutes longer than if I had run two consecutive jobs through compressor normally.

Luckily for myself Apple has now released new Mac Pros with up to 12 cores, so a true test of Virtual Cluster compression will hopefully be coming down the pike. In addition to this poor G5 being put out to pasture.