InBroadcast
Creative collaborative workflows connecting pools of
geo-distributed teams is becoming the new norm in postproduction
On the back of both the significant changes to operational
paradigms brought about by the pandemic and an increasingly heavy demand for
off-site, remote and distributed production video editors need to work on
collaborative projects in disparate locations, and yet still retain the
reliability, operational speed and quality associated with
traditional editing suites.
The answer is in the Cloud.
“Cloud editing, or editing in the Cloud, has firmly
transcended the level of being a purely technical discussion,” says Andrew
Wierzan. VP Product, pixitmedia. “Where it was once a question of ‘could
it work?’ we are now in the realm of ‘will it work for my business?’
While there are many offerings from SaaS, IaaS, Managed
Services, and Roll-Your-Own, media, organisations must be mindful of being
locked into a platform long-term. For creative businesses to remain cost
effective, agile, leverage the next wave of technological developments, and
adapt to continually changing market conditions, this can be easily overlooked,”
says Wierzan.
He says, Cloud is proven to be capable of delivering
performance far in excess of what many on-premise facilities would be willing
to invest in. Aside from the challenge of latency from the datacentre to the
creative, the limiting factor is often how Cloud is integrated into the overall
workflow or pipeline.
“Hybrid must be a key focus for creative organizations and
technology vendors alike. The winners will be those who respect the creative
process, and deliver solutions that benefit the overall creative process.
pixitmedia have been enabling creative organisations to embrace cloud now for a
number of years, in a hybrid, cost-efficient and open way. We utilise the
performance of pixstors unified experience across on-premise, hybrid and cloud,
and with our data management software ngenea, users can take on cloud with no
vendor lock in, bandwidth or capacity tax.
Our solutions give our customers the freedom to rapidly integrate with
other pipeline and workflow software, applications and Cloud.”
LucidLink is a fully native cloud storage system
(Cloud Network Attached Storage/ NAS) built on S3 object storage that enables
collaborative distributed workflows for creative teams working with Adobe
Premiere and other leading NLEs.
LucidLink Filespaces – winner of a NAB 2022 Award for best
Cloud Computing and Storage product is a cloud-native file system specifically
designed for high-latency environments such as media projects to increase
performance, reduce data movement costs, and governance.
Users can easily stream data directly from the cloud,
eliminating the need to download or synchronize. LucidLink is at the forefront
of cloud services and storage, offering a secure file system specifically built
for modern cloud-computing environments. With LucidLink, any application,
process, or workflow can benefit from low-cost and elastic storage.
Its growing list of users includes Final Pixel, a virtual
production studio which is unusual in owning no physical stage infrastructure.
Dominic Maher, Technical Artist, Final Pixel explains,
“There’s simply no comparison in terms of cost between using physical servers
versus a cloud NAS solution like LucidLink, but LucidLink also has the
performance of a full cloud NAS solution with the cost of object storage. That
combination is a no-brainer.”
Final Pixel’s work ranges from creating internal
presentations with massive video files to creating final pixel assets at every
stage from pre-viz to post.
Maher says, “VP is very iterative in the sense that instead
of working on shots sequentially, you do lots of different things in parallel
and maybe sometimes out of sequence. LucidLink fits into that perfectly because
the whole process is so transparent. We’re all working remotely from assets
stored in the cloud, but with LucidLink it’s like there is a drive attached to
your machine.”
Accepting that Cloud production and remote editing are now a
universal part of content creation, the impact on workflows risks being
undermined by widespread use of inefficient methods.
A survey carried out by Caretta Research and sponsored by
cloud editing tools developer Blackbird, suggests 90% of video
professionals have adopted cloud production and remote editing in their
workflows, with collaborative working and client review and approval as the top
use cases.
However, most remote editing is still implemented using
“old-school, inefficient and slow workflows - with 65% of users moving original
high-res media files around the internet to support remote editing workflows.
Many others are moving proxy files, or remoting back to an
edit workstation in a facility, “a model that is wasteful of expensive
resources,” says the report author, Robert Ambrose, Caretta Research’s
Co-founder and MD.
“From our experience talking with hundreds of industry
professionals, we’re seeing a distinct shift from cloud-enabled workflows to
cloud-native workflows. This study shows just that the flexibility of working
remotely has unlocked new value and savings but has often been compromised by
adapting legacy ways of working.
“We’re now seeing the adoption of workflows and tools that
are optimised for cloud, avoiding the cost and security issues of constantly
moving content around.”
Blackbird of course has a vested interest in this finding
since it claims its cloud native technology is less demanding on needing to
send high bit rate data back and forth across the internet. This is a more
efficient use of bandwidth, it maintains, doesn’t require any dedicated
hardware other than a standard workstation and internet connection, and reduces
the carbon output.
Users who’ve adopted cloud video workflows and remote
editing recognise a number of important operational and financial benefits. Top
of the list is the ability to work faster: freed from the constraints of being
in a particular facility, users able to work flexible are more productive. In
turn this translates to cost efficiencies, an important benefit for most users.
Additional benefits of cloud workflows ranked highly by users include access to
more powerful features, and more-resilient operations, avoiding dependency on
physical locations and on-premise infrastructure.
Users of cloud-native tools are far more likely to use them
for fast-turnaround workflows, concludes the report, including creating clips
and highlights for digital platforms and social media, and managing real-time
editing of live content like sports.
With its roots back in the 1990s, Blackbird can lay claim to
being the first browser based editor, and certainly the one that has gained
most commercial traction with customers including Whisper, Cheddar News and Sky
News Arabia.
It is not the only one though. A Norwegian startup CuttingRoom
claims to have launched the first cloud-native browser-based editing and
publishing tool for video pros. It’s a SaaS solution with an interface that
incorporates all the expected elements of a source/sequence/timeline editing
package.
CuttingRoom allows for Adobe After Effects templates to be
integrated, facilitates closed-caption search and metadata management and can
integrate with MAM systems like Vimond, Mimir, Iconik and Wolftech.
In terms of technical specifications, CuttingRoom can ingest
both live and recorded video, stills and audio in a range of formats, which can
be published in a variety of bitrates, aspect ratios and containers. Rendering
is undertaken concurrently, delivering outputs quickly with a consistent
performance that is maintained regardless of load.
CuttingRoom is headed by the co-founders of video streaming
provider Vimond Media Solutions, Glenn S. Pedersen and Helge Høibraaten. They
estimate that editing with their tech can be 25x faster than traditional
approaches. That’s because both editing and rendering can be done
simultaneously, with outputs delivered to any location.
Pedersen said: “Editing professionals are being stretched
too thin; called upon to work with a variety of tools and deal with a range of
technical tasks which distract them from their central purpose: delivering
creative, engaging content. CuttingRoom doesn’t just streamline this, it makes
it accessible from anywhere in the world, to anyone, working in groups of
whatever size they need.”
Høibraaten elaborates: “We’re delivering
a complete workflow. Editors have everything they need to work
together – with all files, assets and timelines maintained centrally and
accessible simultaneously. The result is the ability to deliver beautiful,
consistent content in an editing environment that guarantees reliability, speed
and consistency – with nothing more needed than a license, a browser and a
5Mbps connection.”
For comparison, Blackbird says its “frame accurate,
renderless browser editor” operates on bandwidth from just 2Mbps.
Aimed at collaborative post-production projects using
Resolve, Blackmagic Cloud is a subscription service for which users pay
$5 per month to create and host a shared library that can be used by creatives
working on the same project. Video and audio editors, colourists, VFX artists
etc can all access the Resolve project files through Blackmagic Cloud, from any
location.
When the project is finished, the work can be exported and
the project closed, with no more payment required. Blackmagic will also refund
any of the $5 that hasn’t been used. To make it easier to get the project files
into the cloud, Blackmagic has created three storage devices, to be used in
conjunction with Blackmagic Cloud. The cloud functions are built into the new
hardware and into the major components of DaVinci Resolve
The first device is the Blackmagic Cloud Pod, which is $395.
Customers record onto USB-C flash disks and use the Blackmagic Cloud Pod to
make the disk available on the cloud. Blackmagic Cloud Pod doesn’t have any
storage internally and has two USB-C ports so it can host two separate USB
disks on the network at the same time.
The Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini, which is available with 8TB
of flash memory. Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini costs $2,995. The Blackmagic Cloud
Store which is available in 20TB, 80TB and 320TB models, will be available
later this year, from $9,595.
For Editshare, Cloud editing
is synonymous with creative, premium quality editing using storage and compute
resources in the cloud, controlled from a convenient location using a remote
desktop interface like Teradici.
“It is a hugely powerful enabler for
genuinely distributed, collaborative workflows,” says CTO Stephen Tallamy. “It
also offers potential economies and reduction in environmental impact.”
At NAB, Editshare launched FLEX, the
framework by which editors can use their preferred software – Adobe, Apple,
Avid, Blackmagic and more – on virtual workstations in the AWS cloud.
“Processing resources are spooled up
as required, for example if you need a complex render accomplished quickly.
High quality proxies minimise the need to transfer large, full-resolution
files,” explains Tallamy. “Customers maintain full control over their working
environment and content security, while gaining all the benefits of remote
working and editing in the cloud.”
Any collaborative workflow can take advantage of the cloud,
he says. There are some limitations around calibrated monitoring for high-end
grading so that might best be served by a hybrid model, but certainly cloud
editing delivers real advantages in ‘work anywhere’, as well as reducing
physical and carbon footprints, and in the shift towards an opex financial
model, where the costs of each project can be clearly defined. It also allows
you to very quickly spin up additional resources when you need to meet a
temporary demand.
“If the raw material is stored in the cloud, it makes sense
to process it there, too, rather than introduce the inefficiencies, costs and
security risks of downloading it to remote edit workstations.”
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