Apple Compressor's distributed processing for Autodesk Maya Is there a way to render Autodesk Maya 2017 animation via Compressor 4.3 using 10 iMacs? 

It was possible in previous versions of Compressor (version 2, version 3 and up to version 4.0.7) There were Qmaster and Qadministrator utilities. But I can't run Compressor 4.0.7 or those utilities on macOS 10.12.

A distributed processing is necessary feature for any command line VFX professional application. For instance: Nuke, Shake, Fusion, Maya, Houdini, Renderman, etc...

I am convinced, there is a workaround to use the distributed processing for CLI applications via Terminal (even if this feature is not explicitly supported in Compressor 4.3 GUI).

P.S. Distributed processing isn't supported in Compressor's GUI since 2013 (from v4.1). Compressor's versions 4.1, 4,2 and 4.3 have integrated Qmaster's core allowing to process just Final Cut Pro X and Motion batches using shared computers (as instances). Now Compressor is mainly used for transcoding.



Look at Qmaster.framework located in:

/Applications/Compressor/Contents/Plugins/Compressor/CompressorKit.bundle/Contents/Frameworks


To see a list of CLI commands, type this in Terminal:

/Applications/Compressor.app/Contents/MacOS/Compressor -help
After a thorough research I found out that it's impossible to use Apple Compressor 4.3 via command line for distributed processing.