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176Compressor User Guide
Manually configure file sharing using Compressor
Compressor automatically manages the file sharing required for distributed processing.
However, if you want to use your own file sharing system (such as a dedicated file server,
Xsan, or NAS), you can turn off automatic file sharing, then manually configure file sharing
and manually mount the shared volumes.
For example, if you have a file server or SAN (a storage area network such as Xsan), 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.
Important: When you turn off automatic file sharing with the intention of submitting to a
shared group of computers, 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 will not be able to read
or write the files needed for your batch.
Turn off automatic file sharing
1. Choose Compressor > Preferences (or press Command-Comma), then click Shared
Computers at the top of the window.
2. In the Shared Computers pane, click the “Enable automatic file sharing” checkbox to
deselect it.
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.
1. In the macOS Finder, choose Apple menu > System Preferences.
2. Click Sharing.
3. In the Sharing preferences 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.
4. Below Shared Folders, click the Add button to add folders that you want to share.
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:
1. In the macOS Finder, choose Go > Connect to Server.
2. 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.”
3. In the window that appears, select an authentication method, enter appropriate
credentials to access the shared volume, and click Connect.
4. 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.