Shotcut as a network Renderer

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Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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Does anyone else here use Shotcut as video editing software? I've been using it a bunch personally and am looking to deploy it at work with the addition of a server dedicated to processing tasks, I should be able to monitor a folder and use melt(the parent project for both shotcut and kdenlive) to process things but i'm having a bit of difficulty figuring out that step exactly. I've determined that the projects are portable(if uploaded as a single folder you can just open and export the included MLT file without issue) and am just a bit lost on the automated processing bit.
 

Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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So I found there's a package inotify_tools available for ubuntu, I think I can use it to write a script to accomplish this, has anyone used it before?
 

Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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I've now tried a few silly things(including building an mpi cluster) to try an distribute the task across multiple systems(it didn't but it did render the video once per thread it spawned which was amusing) monitoring a folder and rendering is easy enough but any advice on a way to use multiple systems to accelerate this?
 

SamDabbers

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Apr 12, 2017
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It sounds like you want a "divide and conquer" approach where each system in the cluster renders a segment of the video, then the controller concatenates the segments together at the end. The trick is to split the input into segments first, then use a tool like MPI to schedule the render jobs.

What tool are you using to render?
 

Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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Right now I'm using qmelt which is what shotcut uses by default. I actually did try building a mpi cluster(and succeeded) although instead of spitting my load across two systems I ran the encode job multiple times...
 

Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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I'll have to look into messing with ffmpeg directly. With other projects supporting various network render schemes(blender comes to mind) I'm a bit perplexed why other things don't seem to have a way to scale beyond a single system without a bunch of backend work.