Configure file sharing using Compressor
Compressor supports file sharing on network-attached storage (NAS) devices, storage area networks (SANs) such as Apple’s Xsan, and multiple computers. For example, if you have a file server or SAN, you can use it to hold your source files and any files transcoded from those source files. This allows you to provide a file-sharing strategy that best suits your environment.
By default, Compressor automatically manages the file sharing required for distributed processing. For automatic file sharing to work, you must have file sharing and “Allow guest users” turned on in macOS System Settings. For more information, see Set up file sharing on Mac in the macOS User Guide.
File sharing requires that your computer and the other machines be in the same shared computer group using the same file-sharing protocol. The SMB file-sharing protocol is built into into macOS. However, you are not limited to SMB, so if you have NAS, SAN, or computers that offer maximized throughput using a different protocol, you can use that one. See the documentation for your devices for information on how to configure them for networking and mount the shared volumes.
Important: You must use the common shared volume (or volumes) on all of the computers for the location of the source files and for the location of the transcoded files. If you don’t do this, computers in your shared computer group won’t be able to read or write the files needed for your batch.
Manually configure SMB file sharing
Important: If you’ve already set up your own file-sharing system, you can skip this task and go to the next one.
In the macOS Finder, choose Apple menu > System Settings.
Click Sharing.
In the Sharing settings pane, select the File Sharing checkbox on the left to turn on file sharing.
You can confirm that SMB sharing is on by clicking the Options button and verifying that the “Share files and folders using SMB” checkbox is selected.
Below Shared Folders, click the Add button to add folders that you want to share.
For more information on turning on SMB file sharing, see Set up file sharing on Mac in the macOS User Guide.
Manually mount the SMB volume you enabled
For each computer in your shared computer group, or for any computer you wish to have access to the shared volume, do the following:
In the macOS Finder, choose Go > Connect to Server.
In the window that appears, enter the server address for the SMB volume that you want to mount, then click Connect.
For example, you could enter “smb://MySuperServer.”
In the window that appears, select an authentication method, enter appropriate credentials to access the shared volume, and click Connect.
In the window that appears, select the volume that you want to mount and click OK.
If you are using one computer for submitting Compressor batches and another computer for file sharing, be sure to mount the shared volume on the computer you’re using to submit Compressor batches. See Work with batches in Compressor.
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