5 THINGS - Simplifying Film, TV, and Media Technology

Exactly what video editing software does Hollywood use for film and television? I have an update to our most popular episode from seven long years ago, and today we’ll reexamine the landscape and see how Hollywood has adapted since then, including a change from the big three solutions.

The original “The Truth About Video Editing Software” in 2017 got some attention.

Many years ago, I dissected the video editing landscape here in Hollywood and told you what most editors were using. But most importantly, why? Now, before we look at what’s changed, I do encourage you to check out the original The Truth About Video Editing Software in Hollywood from 2017, to see how we got to where we were…then.

Since 2017, desktop software has improved. New tools have now entered the market, and creating content on your phone now includes editing. There are just so many options out there, so I’ve reached out to various folks in the industry, both on the business and creative side. Some have been under FrieNDA (which is my favorite type of agreement) and some have been under the cloak of night in empty parking garages here in Southern California. But all have granular insight into the industry and where we are today.

When we last left Avid in 2017, they were the undisputed software choice for film and TV picture editing here in Hollywood. Media Composer, their flagship product, had multiple versions for beginners, professionals, and enterprise users. And as a side note, they dominated the post-audio market with Pro Tools. Avid even had their own branded hardware.

Now you’ve got to consider the singularly unique place Avid was during 2017.

Media Composer looked…well, let’s face it, dated. It was designed using then-decades-old iconography and design, which was legacy from the days of helping film editors transition from analog editing to digital. Because most film and TV post-production pipelines within post facilities relied on Avid-centric workflows, updating the interface and workflows to attract new users and to grow Avid’s business heavily risked alienating existing users. As my grandmother used to say, “You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.”

However, in 2019, Avid completed a new look for Media Composer, although they eventually acquiesced and offered the “Classic” look several years later. Avid has also since introduced UME, their new “Universal Media Engine,” which replaces AMA and thus successfully dodges another unfortunate product name (*cough* Avid ISIS *cough*).

After 30 years, Media Composer and Pro Tools finally have direct interoperability.

And after 30 years, Avid finally made the round trip workflow from Avid Media Composer to Avid Pro Tools and back easy with a direct session import and export. No AAFs needed!

When the pandemic hit, the industry had to quickly adapt while working remotely, and while Avid had existing products for these distributed teams, they were either expensive or better suited for broadcast news, or they were still in beta like Avid’s cloud editing product, Edit on Demand, which was both expensive and in beta.

Despite these product roadblocks for remote work, most productions stuck with good old-fashioned Media Composer. Work-from-home editors remoted into existing Avid workstations back at their facilities, which maintained environment familiarity and access to the usual shared storage. Avid rental facilities set up racks of systems to keep post-production moving. Alternative editing solutions to Media Composer didn’t offer huge cost savings for film and TV productions, whether it be doing everything in the cloud or by switching to another editing software platform.

But by and large, if you cut with Media Composer, you stuck with Media Composer.

A review of the Academy Award nominees and winners from 2017 until now also shows that a majority of the nominees and winners were cut with Avid Media Composer. At a business level, Avid reported 15,000 to 20,000 Media Composer Cloud subscriptions in late 2017 and into early 2018.

Now, that may seem low. I mean, how can you dominate one industry with only 20,000 seats of software? But keep in mind, seven years ago, not every Media Composer user had a cloud subscription. Many users still had legacy licenses, which were not yet counted within cloud subscriptions. Now, if we fast forward to late 2023, Avid reported over 150,000 cloud subscriptions for Media Composer prior to their acquisition by the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.

It’s pretty clear Avid remains the standard for film and TV editing in 2024. Now, what will happen now that private equity owns Avid? Well, that’s a subject for another video.

Premiere Pro has been part of the Adobe Creative Cloud package since its inception, giving Adobe a significant advantage in gaining users due to the existing widespread use of other Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. I mean, Premiere is right there to download and use! In 2017, Adobe also had an industry misstep to continue to capitalize on when Final Cut Pro Classic was killed off years prior. Facilities and editors had to find a new video editing solution that was ready to go and could handle workflows for film and television. And let’s face it. Final Cut Pro X wasn’t ready at the time. Now you could have moved to Media Composer, but many saw this as a nonstarter. I mean, they had already opted to go with Final Cut Pro Classic over Media Composer years prior anyway, and that decision wasn’t going to change. At the time, that really only left Premiere Pro.

And so in 2017, Premiere Pro was second, albeit distant, as a choice for film and TV editing. Since 2017, however, Adobe has continued to enhance its Productions workflow, which provides Premiere Pro editors with a collaborative experience similar to Avid’s Bin and Project Sharing, which is a mainstay in collaborative film and TV post-production. And this additional feature did gain Adobe some high-profile film and TV projects. The first Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate, and David Fincher’s projects like Gone Girl and his HBO mini-series Mindhunter were all edited with Premiere Pro, as was last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now, if we look at Hollywood-adjacent productions like those at the Sundance Film Festival, we’ve seen Premiere Pro being used on a greater number of films over the years, and it’s now accounting for over half of all projects showcased at the festival. And even more projects use Adobe if you include other Adobe tools like Frame.io.

However, the fact remains that Premiere Pro in Hollywood has remained more unique than the standard. The general consensus is that Premiere Pro is still easily the main alternative to Avid Media Composer for film and TV work. But is that a bad thing? I mean, it’s important to remember that the market is relatively small compared to other, more lucrative media-rich markets, plus social media, where video content is produced at an exponentially faster rate than film and television. In fact, recent studies show that a majority of young Americans aspire to be social media influencers over most any other career. Film and TV are no longer the only media vehicles for visibility, let alone creative work. So for Adobe, why continue to focus heavily on a market that is no longer the main avenue that many creatives aspire to work in?

I think I’d rather take the bag of money from a faster-growing market over a case study and my logo in the credits of the film. Adobe doesn’t release much in the way of metrics for app usage. However, Adobe did report that it had approximately 12 million Creative Cloud subscriptions in 2017, and the subscriber count has grown to over 33 million in 2023. This year, however, Adobe has faced many challenges, including poor communication about how their AI is trained and emerging legal issues with the DOJ and FTC over early subscription termination fees and a complex cancellation process. As of now, it’s unclear how this will affect Adobe moving forward.

Those of us that were at the 2011 NAB SuperMeet knew we were seeing something special during Apple’s surprise unveiling of Final Cut Pro X, but little did we know, the fallout from this single announcement would have permanent, continuous repercussions for Apple editing software in Hollywood. Now, the Final Cut Pro X launch missteps have been chronicled extensively elsewhere, so I don’t need to rehash them ad nauseum.

But I will mention a few key points as they’re important for context to understand where we are today.

Higher-profile film and TV post-production requires a solid tech stack and software interoperability. This includes multiple hardware components as well as a trained staff to maintain it. Often, complete turnkey systems for post-production are sold by what we call Systems Integrators or VARs (Value Added Resellers). Post facilities often buy from VARs because pricing is generally better, and the VAR can build, test, deploy, and support these solutions.

Putting the “value” in “Value Added Reseller”

Unlike Final Cut Pro Classic, Final Cut Pro X did not go through the usual sales channels. It was an App Store purchase. This meant that the VARs’ role was largely mitigated and thus professional adoption was slowed.

It would take Apple several years to get Final Cut Pro X to a level where it could be used in professional film and TV workflows. We had a perfect storm of factors that had most professional editors, and especially facilities, simply not interested in moving forward with Apple editing software. And as I said in 2017, it’s these hurdles that made Final Cut Pro X a distant third in Hollywood film and TV editing. And it hasn’t gotten any better.

In 2022, the editing community created a petition asking Apple to publicly stand by the use of Final Cut Pro for TV and film industries worldwide. Now, to their credit, Apple did respond, and they committed to the joint development of training and certification courses, plus creating an industry advisory panel and an increase in Hollywood-centric workshops for film and TV editors. So while Final Cut Pro X has matured to be a professional editing solution and has been used on a handful of high-profile projects, the window of opportunity to ascend or even eclipse the level of its predecessor has unfortunately closed. However, as a slight silver lining, Apple hardware was and still is a mainstay in the professional content creation industry, and I bet many of you have an iPhone instead of an Android.

When I last covered DaVinci Resolve, many of you predicted it would become Hollywood’s next “do all” tool. And you were…half right. Resolve has had significant updates since Blackmagic acquired it, including adding Fusion for VFX and Fairlight for post-audio, which creates a very comprehensive suite of tools. Resolve’s speed makes it excellent for transcoding, and in some specialized cases, Fusion can replace expensive legacy VFX systems.

But it’s Resolve’s color tools that have now become the industry standard for color grading. And it’s not just because of their intricate controls, affordability, and overall innovations, but because the existing color tool sets in Hollywood ten years ago were, let’s face it, lacking. Avid’s advanced color grading tool, Symphony, had very few feature updates at the time and required higher monthly costs. Lumetri, the Premiere Pro color tool, was also beginning to show its age following Adobe’s acquisition of SpeedGrade in 2011. Plus, the other color solutions on the market were either expensive or existed outside the video editing software that most creatives were familiar with, so there was a major deficit in accessible color tools, but not in creative video editing tools.

Avid and Adobe’s editorial tools had decades of nuanced development and were already affordable for most. Resolve’s video editing features were still evolving at the time. The flip side, however, is that even if Blackmagic did introduce revolutionary video editing tools within Resolve at the time, they still would have faced massive resistance from a Hollywood industry still wary of wholesale video editing changes following the failure of Final Cut Pro X to succeed. There simply wasn’t enough incentive for Hollywood to switch to Resolve for professional video editing.

But that’s not the full story. The free version of Resolve, or the one-time payment for Studio, is a no-brainer compared to continual, eternal paid subscriptions from other leaders like Adobe and Avid. Bundling the more powerful Resolve Studio with a Blackmagic camera purchase was also a fantastic marketing move. Resolve offers incredible value, especially for new editors, and it’s a well-established business tactic that getting buy-in from the younger, next generation of creatives is a fantastic way to boost sales down the road.

While the details on exact download numbers and usage are not publicized, in 2019, Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty did say that Resolve downloads topped 2 million, and I can’t see any reason why it still wouldn’t be growing. As an interesting side note, however, there’s a vast difference between the number of free users of Resolve and the number of paid users of Resolve Studio. The general consensus is that most professional film and TV creatives are going to need the features found in the paid Studio version, but most industry analysts estimate that only 5% or so of Resolve users actually pay for the Resolve Studio upgrade. So those professional creatives, at least those in Hollywood, are overwhelmingly using Resolve for color work and other side tasks, but they’re not using it as their primary video editor.

With Avid and Adobe taking the top spots as the creative editorial choices here in Hollywood, Resolve as a video editor faces steep competition, not unlike the smartphone market, with Apple and Android dominating the marketplace with no real challengers. So, however distant, that third place for video editing software in Hollywood that was previously occupied by Final Cut Pro can now easily be filled with the logo from Blackmagic Design. But like Adobe, this does beg the question: “Are the vanity bragging rights for Hollywood’s editors worth the windfall of cash to be found by capturing other markets?”

As is in life, there are no absolutes, and there will always be exceptions and outliers. Parasite won Best Picture in 2019, and it used Final Cut Pro Classic software that had been dead for eight years. The legendary Thelma Schoonmaker has used Lightworks for several of Scorsese’s movies, including Killers of the Flower Moon, which had ten Oscar nominations in 2023.

If anything, these two footnotes should reinforce that it’s not the tool, it’s the talent. Knowing the right tool makes you employable. Your talent is what keeps you employed. So what do you think we’ll see in the next seven years? Will predominantly mobile solutions like CapCut or open-source solutions make their way into the professional film and TV market? Or do you have a hot take on AI in Hollywood? I look forward to your thoughts.

Until the next episode, Learn more, do more. Thanks for watching.

Generative A.I. is the big sexy right now. Specifically creating audio, stills, and videos using AI. What’s often overlooked, however, is how useful Analytical A.I. is. In the context of video analysis, it would involve facial or location recognition, logo detection, sentiment analysis, and speech-to-text, just to name a few. And those analytical tools are what we’ll focus on today.

We’ll start with small tools and then go big with team and facility tools. But I will sneak in some Generative AI here and there for you to play with.

StoryToolKitAI can transcribe audio and index video

Welcome to the forefront of post-production evolution with StoryToolKitAI, a brainchild of Octavian Mots. And with an epic name like Octavian, you’d expect something grand.

He understood the assignment.

StoryToolKitAI transforms how you interact with your own local media. Sure, it handles the tasks we’ve come to expect from A.I. tools that work with media like speech-to-text transcription.

But it also leverages zero-shot learning for your media. “What’s zero shot learning?” you ask.

Imagine an AI that can understand and execute tasks that it was never explicitly trained for. StoryToolKitAI with zero-shot learning is like trying to play charades. It somehow gets things right the first time. While I’m still standing there making random gestures, hoping someone will figure out that I’m trying to act out Jurassic Park and not just practicing my T-Rex impersonation for Halloween.

How Zero-Shot Learning Works. Via Modular.ai.

Powered by the goodness of GPT, StoryToolKitAI isn’t just a tool. It’s a conversational partner. You can use it to ask detailed questions about your index content, just like you would talk with chat GPT. And for you DaVinci Resolve users out there, StoryToolkitAI integrates with Resolve Studio. However, remember Resolve Studio is the paid version, not the free one.

Diving Even Nerdier: StoryToolkit AI employs various open-source technologies, including the RN50x4 CLIP model for zero-shot recognition. One of my favorite aspects of StoryToolkit is that it runs locally. You get privacy, and with ongoing development, the future holds endless possibilities.

Now, imagine wanting newer or even bespoke analytical A.I. models tailored for your specific clients or projects. The power to choose and customize A.I. models. Well, who does it like playing God with a bunch of zeros and ones, right? Lastly, StoryToolKitAI is passionately open-source. Octavian is committed to keeping this project accessible and free for everyone. To this end, you can visit their Patreon page to support ongoing development efforts (I do!)

On a larger scale, and on a personal note, I believe the architecture here is a blueprint for how things should be done in the future. That is, media processing should be done by an A.I. model – with its transparent practices – of your choosing and can process media independently of your creative software.

A potential architecture for AI implementation for Creatives

Or better yet, tie this into a video editing software’s plug-in structure, and then you have a complete media analysis tool that’s local and using the model that you choose.

Have you ever heard of Twelve Labs?

Don’t confuse Twelve Labs with Eleven Labs, The A.I. Voice synthesis company.

Twelve Labs is another interesting solution that I think is poised to blow up… or at least be acquired. While many analytical A.I. indexing solutions search for content based on literal keywords, what if you could perform a semantic search? That is, using a search engine that understands words from the searcher’s intent and their search context.

This type of search is intended to improve the quality of search results, Let’s say here in the U.S., we wanted to search for the term “knob”. 

Other English speakers may be searching for something completely different.

That may not actually be the best way to illustrate this. Let’s try something different.

“And in order to do this, you would need to be able to understand video the way a human understands video. What we mean by that is not only considering the visual aspect of video and the audio component but the relationship between those two and how it evolves over time, because context matters the most. ”

Travis Couture
Founding Solutions Architect
Twelve Labs

Right now, Twelve Labs has a free plan which is hosted by Twelve Labs. It’s fairly generous. However, if you want to take deeper advantage of their platform, they also have a developer plan. Twelve Labs tech can be used for tasks like ad insertion or even content moderation like figuring out which videos featuring running water depict natural scenes like rivers and waterfalls or manmade objects like faucets and showers.

Twelve Labs use cases

With no insider info, I’d wager that Twelve Labs will be acquired as the tech is too good not to be rolled into a more complete platform. 

During the Production of this episode, our friends at Wasabi have acquired the Curio product. 

Next up, we have Curio Anywhere by GrayMeta, and it’s one of the first complete analytical A.I. solutions for media facilities. Now, this isn’t just a tagging tool. It’s a pioneering approach to using A.I. for indexing and tagging your content, using their localized models, and if you so choose, cloud models, too.

In addition to all of this, there’s also a twist. See, traditionally analytical A.I. generated metadata can drown you in data and options and choices, overloading and overwhelming you. GrayMeta’s answer is a user-friendly interface that simplifies the search and audition process right in your web browser. This means briefly being able to see what types of search results are present in your library across all of the models.

Is it a spoken word? Maybe it’s the face of someone you’re looking for. Perhaps it’s a logo. And for you Adobe Premiere users out there, you can access all of these features right within Premiere Pro via GrayMeta’s Curio Anywhere Panel Extension. Now let’s talk customization. Curio Anywhere allows you to refine models to recognize specific faces or objects.

Curio Anywhere Face Training Interface

Imagine the possibilities for your projects without days of training a model to find that person. Connectivity is key and Curio Anywhere nails it, whether it’s cloud storage or local data, Curio Anywhere has got you covered. And it’s not just about media files either. Documents are also part of the package. Here’s a major win: Curio Anywhere’s models are developed in-house by GrayMeta, and this means no excessive reliance on costly third-party analytical services.

But if you do prefer using those services, don’t worry Curio Anywhere supports those too, via API. For those of you eager to delve deeper into GrayMeta and their vision, I had a fascinating conversation with Aaron Edell, President and CEO of GrayMeta. We talk about a lot of things, including Curio Anywhere, making coffee, and if the robots will take us over. 

It’s time to get a little bit more low level with CodeProject.AI Server, which handles both analytical and generative A.I. Imagine CodeProject.AI Server as Batman’s utility belt.”

Each gadget and tool on the belt represents a different analytical or generative A.I. function designed for specific tasks. And just like Batman has a tool for just about any challenge, CodeProject.AI Server offers a variety of A.I. tools that can be selectively deployed and integrated into your systems, all without the hassle of cloud dependencies. It includes object and face detection, scene recognition, text and license plate reading, and for funsies, even the transformation of faces into anime-style cartoons.

CodeProject.AI Server Modules

Additionally, it can generate text summaries and perform automatic background removal from images. Now you’re probably wondering, “how does this integrate into my facility or my workflow?” The server offers a straightforward HTTP REST API. For instance, integrating scene detection in your app is as simple as making a JavaScript call to the server’s API. This makes it a bit more universal than a proprietary standalone AI framework.

It’s also self-hosted, open source, and can be used on any platform, and in any language. It also allows for extensive customization and the addition of new modules to suit your specific needs. This flexibility means it’s adaptable to a wide range of applications from personal projects to enterprise solutions. The server is designed with developers in mind.

Pinokio is a playground for you to experiment with the latest and greatest in Generative AI. It unifies many of the disparate repos on GitHub. But let’s back up a moment. You’ve heard of GitHub, right? Most folks in the post-production space don’t spend much time on GitHub.

It’s for Developers!

It’s what developers use to collaborate and share code for almost any project you can think of. GitHub is where cool indie stuff like A.I. starts before it goes mainstream. Yes, you too can be a code hipster by using Pinokio and GitHub and you can experiment with various A.I. services before they go mainstream and become soooo yesterday. As you can imagine, if GitHub is for programmers, how can non-coding types use it?

Pinokio is a self-contained browser that allows you to install and run various analytical and generative AI applications and models without knowing how to code. Pinokio does this by taking GitHub code repositories -called repos – and automating the complex setups of terminals, git clones, and environmental settings. With Pinokio, it’s all about easy one-click installation and deployment, all within its web browser.

Diving into Pinoki ‘s capabilities, there’s already a list chock full of diverse A.I. applications from image manipulation with Stable Diffusion and FaceFusion to voice cloning and A.I. generated videos with tools like K and Animate Diff. The platform covers a broad spectrum of AI tools. Pinokio helps to democratize access to A.I. tools by combining ease of use with a growing list of modules as it continues to grow in various sectors.

Platforms like Pinokio are vital in empowering users to explore and leverage AI’s full potential. The cool part is that these models are constantly being developed and refined by the community. Plus, since it runs locally and it’s free, you can learn and experiment without being charged per revision. 

Every week there are more analytical and generative A.I. tools being developed and pushed to market.

If I missed one, let me know what they are and what they do in the comments section below or hit me up online. Subscribing and sharing would be greatly appreciated.

5 THINGS is also available as a video or audio-only podcast, so search for it on your podcast platform du jour. Look for the red logo!

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe. 

PSA: This is not a paid promotion.

Is the embedded video not working? Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UO6e_wMAp_0

In 2019, MovieLabs, a not-for-profit group founded by the 5 major Hollywood Studios released a whitepaper called “The 2030 Vision”. This paper detailed the 10 Principles that each of the studios agree is how they want to usher in the next generation of Hollywood content creation.

What are these 10 principles, why should you care, and who the heck is MovieLabs?

Let’s start there.

Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Walt Disney Pictures and Television, and Warner Bros. Entertainment are part of a joint research and development effort called MovieLabs. As an independent, not-for-profit organization, Movielabs was tasked with defining the future workflows of the member studios and developing strategies to get there.

This led to their authoring of the “2030 Vision Paper”.

2030 Vision Overview

As Movielabs is also charged with evangelizing these 2030 goals, they’ve become the Pied Pipers for the future media workflows of the Hollywood studio system.

Now, what most folks don’t realize is that a vast majority of Hollywood is risk-averse.

Changing existing, predictable (and budgetable) workflows doesn’t happen until a strong case can be made for significant time and cost savings. Without a defined goal to work towards, studio productions would most likely continue on the path they’ve been on, and only iterating incrementally.

So, defining these goals and getting buy-in from each studio meant that there would be a joint effort to realize this 2030 vision. It also gave all the companies who provide technology to the studios a broad roadmap to develop against.

Essentially, everyone sees the blinking neon sign of the 2030 Vision Paper, and everyone is making their way through the fog to get to that sign.

The 2030 Vision Paper is directly influencing the way hundreds of millions of dollars are – and will – be spent.

So, what exactly does this manifesto say?

The 10 core principles of the Movielabs 2030 Vision Paper can be organized into 3 broad categories: A New Cloud Foundation, Security & Access, and Software-defined Workflows.

The first half of these 10 principles relate directly to the cloud.

This means that any audio and video being captured go directly to the cloud – and stay there. And it’s not just captured content, it’s also supporting files like scripts and production notes. Captured content can either be beamed directly to the cloud or saved locally and THEN immediately sent to the cloud. This media can be a mix of camera or DIT-generated proxies and high-resolution camera originals, plus any audio assets.

As of now, an overwhelming majority of productions are saving all content locally. Multiple copies and versions are then made from these local camera originals. Then, the selected content is moved to the cloud. The cloud is usually not the first, nor primary repository for storage.

Having everything in the cloud is done for one big reason: if all the assets – from production to post-production – are in a place that anyone with permission in the world can access, then we no longer have islands of the same media replicated in multiple places, whether it be on multiple cloud storage pools or sitting on storage at some facility.

We’d save a metric [bleep]-ton of time lost by copying files, waiting for files to be sent to us, and the cost to each facility for storing everything locally.

Of course, having the media in the cloud does present some obvious challenges. How do we edit, color grade, perform high-resolution VFX, or mix audio with content sitting in the cloud?

That’s where Principle #2 comes into play.

Most local software applications for professional creatives are built on the concept that the media’s assets are local, either on a hard drive connected to your computer or on some kind of network-shared storage. Accessing the cloud for all media introduces increased lag and reduced bandwidth that most applications are just not built for.

Despite this, one of the many tech questions answered by the pandemic was “What is the viability of creatively manipulating content when you don’t have the footage locally?”

The answer is that in many cases, it’s totally doable. Companies like LucidLink thrived by enabling cloud storage with media to be used and shared by remote creatives in different locations. LucidLink was the glue that enabled applications to come to the media and not the other way around.

Now, in most cases, we still need to use proxies, rather than high-res files, for most software tools. Editing, iterating, and viewing high-res material that’s sitting in the cloud is still difficult unless you have a tailored setup. Luckily, we still have 7 years before 2030 – and advancements on this front are constantly evolving.

Working with everything while it’s in the cloud also means that when it’s time to release your blockbuster, you can simply point to the finished versions in the cloud – no need to upload new versions.

That’s where Principle #3 comes in.

This means no more waiting for the changes you’ve made on a local machine to export and then re-upload, then generate new links and metadata, as well as the laundry list of other things that can go wrong during versioning. The cloud will process media faster in most cases, as you can effectively “edit in place”.

The promise is that of time savings and less room for error.

Moving on, Principle #4 gets a bit wordy, but it’s necessary.

Archives generally house content that is saved for long-term preservation or for disaster recovery, and should rarely, if ever, be accessed. This is because archived material is typically saved on storage that is cheaper per Terabyte, but with the caveat that restoring any of that archived content will take time, and thus money.

This philosophy is as true for on-premises storage as it is for cloud storage. It can simply be cost-prohibitive to have massive amounts of content on fast storage when access to it is infrequent.

So, Principle #4 is saying that not everyone uses archives the same way, and if you do need to access that content in the cloud somewhere down the road, your archive should be set up in a way that makes financial sense for the frequency of access, while also ensuring that secure user permissions are granted to those who understand this balance.

Principle #4 also dovetails nicely into a major consideration with archived assets. Ya know, making more money!

Sooner or later, an executive is gonna get the great-and-never-thought-of-before idea to re-monetize archived assets. Whether it’s a sequel, reboot, or super-duper special anniversary edition, you’re going to need access to that archived content. Our next principle provisions for this.

Having content in a single location that you’re allowed to see is one thing, but how you accurately search for and then retrieve what you need is, for now, a challenging problem.

Let’s take this one step further: Years or even decades may have passed since the content was archived, and modern software may not be able to read the data properly.
Some camera RAW formats, as the paper points out, are proprietary to each camera manufacturer and need to be DeBayered using their proprietary algorithms.

So, do we convert the files to something more universal (for now) or simply archive the software that can debayer the files?

We simply don’t have a way to 100% futureproof every bit of content.

What I’m getting at here is that the content has to be fully accessible and actionable – all in the cloud.

OK, Great, stuff is in the cloud, but how do I make sure that only the right people have access to it?

Slow down, and take a breath, as Security and Access are one of the 3 areas of attention in the 2030 Vision paper.

Peeling the onion layers back, this will require the industry to devise and implement a mechanism to identify and validate every person who has access to an asset on a production, which we’ll call a “Production User ID”.

This would be for all creatives, executives, and anyone else involved in the production. This “Production User ID” would allow that verified person to access or edit specific assets in the cloud for that production.

This also paves the way for permissions and rights that are based on the timing of the project.

As the 2030 Vision Paper calls out, “A colorist may not need access to VFX assets but does need final composited frames; a dubbing artist may need two weeks’ access to the final English master and the script but does not need access to the final audio stems; and so on.”

As Hollywood frequently employs freelancers – and executives change jobs – this also allows for users to have their access revoked when their time on the production is over.

In theory, tying this to a “Production User ID” means all permissions for any Production you work on are administered to your single ID. You wouldn’t have to remember even more usernames and passwords, which should make all of you support and I.T. folks watching and reading this a bit happier.

As you can imagine, accessing the content doesn’t mean it’s 100% protected while you’re using it.

This is where I hope a biometric approach to security takes off sooner rather than later, as the addition of new security layers on top of aging precautionary measures is often incredibly frustrating. Multiple verification systems also increase the chance of systems not working properly with one another, which is a headache for everyone…and your IT folk.

Movielabs suggests “Security by design;’ which means designing systems where security is a foundational component of system design – not a bolt-on after the fact. There is also the expectation that safeguards will be deployed to handle predictive threat detection and that hopefully this will negate the need for 3rd party security audits, which is a massive headache and time suck.

The security model also assumes that any user at any time could be compromised. Yes, this includes you, executives. You are not above the law. This philosophy is also known as “Zero Trust”, and if you had my parents, you’d totally understand the concept of “zero trust”.

The last Principle in the “Security and Access” section is #8:

If you’ve done any kind of work with proxies, or managed multiple versions of a file, then you’ve dealt with the nightmare that is relinking files. Changes in naming conventions, timecode, audio channels, and even metadata can cause your creative application du jour to throw “Media Offline” gang signs.

And this isn’t just for media files. Supporting documents like scripts, project files, or sidecar metadata files can frequently have multiple versions.

This means that in addition to needing a “Production User ID” per person, we also need a unique way to identify every single media asset on a production; and every user with permission needs to be able to relink to that asset inside the application they’re using.

That’s a pretty tall order.

The upside is that you shouldn’t have to send files to other creatives – you simply send a link to the media, or even just to the project file, which already links to the media.

The goal is also to have this universal, relinking identifier functioning across multiple cloud providers. The creative application would then work in the background with the various cloud providers to use the most optimized version of the media for where and what the creative is doing.

Oh yeah, all of this should be completely transparent to the user.

The last 2 principles are centered around using software to define our production and post-production workflows.

This principle covers two huge areas. The first is a common “ontology” – that is, a unified set of terminology and metadata, as well as common industry API.

Consider this: You’ve been hired to work on The Fast and Furious 27, and there is, unpredictably, a flashback sequence.

You need access to all media from the 26 previous movies to find clips of Vin Diesel, err Dom, sitting in a specific car at night, smiling. Have the 26 previous movies been indexed second by second, so you can search for that exact circumstance? How do you filter search results to see if he’s sitting in a car or standing next to it? How do you filter out if the car is in pristine shape or riddled with bullet holes after a high-speed shootout with a fighter jet?

As an industry, don’t have “connected ontologies” meaning, we can’t even agree that the term for something, say, in a production sense is the exact same thing in a CGI sense. If we can’t even agree on unified terms for things, how we can label them so you can then search for them while working on the obvious Oscar bait Fast and Furious 27?

The second ask is a common industry API or “Application Programming Interface” that all creative software applications use.

This allows the software to be built in such a way that it can be slotted into modular workflows. This is meant to combat compatibility issues between legacy tools and emerging workflows…and reduce downtime due to siloed tech solutions. While each modular software solution can be specialized, there will also be a minimum set of data, metadata, and format support that other software modules in the production workflow can understand. This also means that because of this base level of compatibility, all creative functions will be non-destructive.

Wait, you may be thinking…how in the world is this accomplished?

All changes made during the production and post-production process will be saved as metadata. This metadata can be used against the original camera files. This provides not only the ultimate in media fidelity but also the ability to peel back the metadata layers at any time to iterate.

We wrap up Principle #10:

I get this; no one likes to wait.

When and if Principle #10 is realized, it means no more waiting for rendering, whether it be for on-set live visual effects, game engines, or even CGI in post. The processing in the cloud will negate the need to wait for renders. Feedback and iteration can be done in a significantly shorter amount of time. Creative decisions onset can be made in the moment rather than based on renders weeks or months later.

The 2030 Vision Paper also suggests this would limit post-production time – as well as budget – as more of each would be shifted towards visualizations in pre-photography.

Yes…ish?

There are a ton of moving parts – with both business and technology partners – that Movielabs annually checks the industry’s progress towards the 2030 vision; and Movielabs provides a gap analysis current state of the industry and the work that remains.

Without question, our industry has made advancements in areas like camera-to-cloud capture, VFX turnovers, real-time rendering, and creative collaboration tools that are all cloud-native. The Hollywood Professional Association – or HPA – Tech Retreat this year, which has become the de facto standard for must-attend industry conferences, showcased many Hollywood projects, and technology partners, like AWS, Skywalker, Disney Marvel.

The 10 principles need a foundation to build upon, and that means getting this cloud thing handled first. And that’s just what we saw.

Principles 1, 2, and 3 were the predominant Principles that large productions attempted to tackle first, with a smattering of “Software Defined Workflow” progress.

However, these case studies also reflected where we do need to make more progress, as we are already 4 years into this 2030 vision. These gaps include:

We also have gaps in operational support, where workflows are complex and often span multiple organizations, systems, or platforms.

If we take a look at Change Management, we do run into fundamental problems with a move of this scale.

I’m sure you have some input on one or more of these 5 THINGS. Let me know in the comments section. Also, please subscribe and share this tech goodness with the rest of your techie friends.

5 THINGS is also available as a video or audio-only podcast, so search for it on your podcast platform du jour. Look for the red logo!

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe. 

Editing & Motion Graphics: Amy at AwkwardAnthems.

Not too long ago, I posted on several social media social platforms asking what questions YOU had on AI. 

Reddit | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn

I’ve taken all of the 100+ responses, put them in nice neat little (5!) categories, and – wow – do I have a deluge for you.

By far, the most asked question was “what tools are available today?”

The easiest life is that of automated content analysis. For a hundred years, we’ve relied on a label on a film canister, a sharpie scrawl on the spine of a videotape case, or the name of a file sitting on your desktop.

Sure, while this tells you the general contents of that media, it’s not specific.

“What locations were they at?”

“What was said in each scene?”

“Were they wearing pants?”

This is where AI’s got your back. With content analysis, sometimes called automated metadata tagging, AI can analyze your media, recognize logos, objects, people, and their emotions, plus, transcribe what was said, and generate these time-based metadata tags. It’s a little bit like having Sherlock Holmes on your team, solving the mystery of the missing footage.

Because there is always a better take somewhere….right?

AI-assisted color grading is also starting to gain traction. With the help of AI models, colorists can quickly analyze the color palette of a video and create a consistent base grade.

This can save a ton of time when you’re dealing with various bits of media with different formats and color profiles. It does the balance pass so you can start to create …quicker.

AI can also suggest starter options for more creative color grades.

Like…adding a touch of “teal and orange”.

Colorists can also use existing content as an example to tell the AI the look you’re aiming for. Check out Colourlab.ai.

Additionally, AI tools are revolutionizing audio post-production, too. Noise reduction algorithms powered by AI can effectively remove unwanted background noise, enhance dialogue clarity, and improve overall audio quality. While this tech has been around for a while, adding AI models to existing algorithms is making these tools even more powerful.

These models also help with Frankenbiting.

Text-to-speech tools that also allow generated audio to sound like someone else – also called voice cloning – is a fantastic tool for Frankenbiting. For most of us commercially, it’s great right now for scratch narration or to replace a word or two, but it’s not quite at the point where you can easily adjust intonation. However, when that is possible, editors may possibly have a new skill to learn – crafting the performance of the voice-over in the timeline. Check out Elevenlabs.

Text-to-image and text-to-video products are rapidly being developed, just look at services like Runway, Midjourney, Dall-E, Kaiber, and a host of others. And while we can’t generate believable video b-roll on the fly (unless you like the current generative AI aesthetic) once that boundary is crossed, this will change the way editors work.

OK, instead of adding…can we subtract?

Rotoscoping tools are readily available in industry-standard tools like Photoshop. We can erase objects in near real-time and also use tools like Generative Fill for AI to “guess” what is missing right outside of the frame.

Now, Large Language Models – or LLMs – are the key for AI to understand what you want when you ask it a question. LLMs are also imperative for our next skill….text to code. Now, why is that important to you?

Many motion graphics software packages have an underlying code base you can use to script the actions you want. So, until text-to-video becomes more mature, you can use AI to generate code and scripts to tell the motion graphics tool what you want to do. Check out KlutzGPT.

All of the aforementioned model types are just a sampling of the broad categories of specific AI models. In fact, HuggingFace, a repository for various AI models and datasets, has nearly 40 categories of models for you to download, train, and experiment with to assist you on your next project.

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent but the ones most adaptable to change”, once wrote Leo Megginson. And while he’s not wrong, I much prefer my attention span appropriate “Adapt or Die”, by Charles Darwin.

AI and its many variants are exploding. AI has already become the fastest-adopted business technology in history.

So, how can you adapt to this?

Well, the first step is to not panic.

DON’T PANIC.

If you’ve used any type of AI, you can totally see the current deficits. Whether it’s factual hallucinations or relatives with 20 fingers and 37 toes, AI will be evolving, which gives you time to learn and use AI tools as your sidekick, and not your replacement.

As AI for the general public is still in its infancy, it’s critical for us to learn about the AI models we’re utilizing. This means what data was used to train them, and who has curated that same data the models were trained on? This level of openness not only empowers us to make better decisions when selecting model providers but also fosters a culture of responsibility. We’ll discuss this a bit more later.

As with any moment in the zeitgeist, it’s imperative that we understand the difference between what’s the real deal, and what’s part of the hype machine. We’re likely to see the “AI” label slapped on many tools. Now, you may not think this is a big deal, but it can be.

To start off, it’s a matter of investment and value. You want to ensure you’re getting the whizzbang AI capabilities you’ve paid for, and not just a repackaged widget marketed as AI.

Genuine AI tools can also perform complex tasks, adapt to new situations, and sometimes even learn from those experiences, leading to more efficient processes and smoother outcomes. Non-AI tools or overhyped plugins, however, may not deliver their promised results, leading to major disappointment and potential setbacks in your project or business.

Plus, understanding the capabilities of AI tools can lead to better usage. Knowing what an AI tool can and can’t do allows you to utilize it to its fullest potential.

On the other hand, blatantly mislabeling a non-AI tool as AI can lead to wasted time or underuse.

Lastly, it’s really about ethics and transparency. Misrepresenting a tool’s capabilities is deceptive marketing, plain and simple. This is already a major problem – and a rarely policed one at that – in the tech world. It erodes trust between providers and users and can lead to skepticism about the entire field of AI.

Now, speaking of Ethics….

As we leverage AI to push the boundaries of creativity, we’re faced with new dilemmas, around privacy, security, bias, and yes, our core ethics.

These aren’t just questions for the tech wizards or the philosophical ponderers. They’re issues that each one of us, as contributors to the creative world, needs to grapple with.

Why?

Because the decisions we make today will shape the digital landscape of tomorrow.

If we start with your creative tools, such as the ability for voice cloning and face swapping – which do have legitimate applications in our industry – they also raise ethical issues such as privacy, consent, authenticity, and accountability.

For example, voice cloning and face swapping could be used to create fake news, deep fakes, or malicious impersonations that could harm the reputation or even the safety of the original speakers or actors. Plus, bad actors could undermine the trust and credibility of the creative content and its sources.

To solve this, we need explicit consent from the original person before their voice or face is used. No more unsolicited ‘borrowing’. These technologies aren’t a license to steal.

Next, we need transparency. Any content using these technologies should have some form of credit or disclaimer, to ensure the audience knows what’s up.

Finally, accountability and traceability are key. Keeping track of source data and synthetic outputs ensures responsible use. This means finally deciding on and implementing some form of chain of custody solution, such as the content authenticity initiative.

In essence, we’re talking about a culture of responsibility in AI usage, balancing the scales of creativity and ethics.

From a macro perspective, data privacy and security have become increasingly critical ethical concerns within the AI sphere. As AI systems extensively rely on vast amounts of your personal data, the issues of data ownership and protection have exploded. To handle this, it’s imperative to establish and enforce stringent data protection guidelines.

The problem is, we’ve already been using the internet for a few decades now, and a good chunk of your data is already out there. That forum terms-of-service that you just scrolled past and clicked I ACCEPT on, has your data, which they can potentially monetize in any number of ways – including using it to train new AI models.

Now, ethical online services could certainly provide users with a user-friendly opt-out option, particularly for AI services that are deemed excessively invasive. Similar to the CAN-SPAM Act in the US and GDPR regulation in the UK, this could allow users to opt out of the use of any of their data to be used in training AI models.

There are several generative AI cases currently making their way through the U.S. legal system, including lawsuits against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, who are accused of mass copyright infringement. Microsoft, which owns GitHub, and OpenAI are also being sued over Microsoft Copilot’s tendency for reproducing developers’ publicly posted, open-source, licensed code. Keep tabs on these cases as they will shape how the combined art you make with AI is recognized.

Another critical point to consider is the potential for bias and discrimination in AI. The danger here is that biased data can lead to AI systems that further perpetuate those biases. The key to breaking this cycle is ensuring that the data used to train AI is diverse and unbiased and captures multiple perspectives. It’s also essential to regularly monitor AI systems to identify and rectify any biases that may sneak in.

Mandating AI model providers to publish their datasets to the public won’t fly, which means some form of audit by a 3rd party. The immediate thought here is some form of regulatory body, which I really can’t see a way around.

Transparency in AI algorithms is also an integral part of ethical AI use. It’s important for creators to understand how and why AI systems make certain decisions. As AI for the masses is a relatively new technology, we all need to become educated on the models we’re using. This kind of transparency can lead to more informed model provider choices and quite frankly encourages a sense of accountability.

Update: OpenAI, Google, others pledge to watermark AI content for safety, White House says.

The broader societal implications of AI in the creative industry extend well beyond your editing fortress of solitude. As AI continues to transform workflows and redefine job roles, it is crucial to support your fellow creatives in adapting to these changes.

One way to support creatives is through continued education and upskilling programs. As AI tools become more prevalent, editors should embrace lifelong learning and acquire new skills to stay relevant in our industry. By developing a deeper level of understanding of AI technology and its applications, editors can leverage AI to their advantage and remain valuable contributors to the creative process.

As Phil Libin, creator of Evernote and mmhmm, and current CEO of All Turtles said: “AI won’t replace any humans, humans using AI will.”

Phil’s quote, but my presentation – LACPUG May 2023

Like it or not, Democratic governance of AI is also crucial to address potential risks and ensure responsible AI development and usage.

Transparent regulations and ethical guidelines can help shape the future of AI in a way that aligns with our societal values and prevents misuse.

I know, that last statement is loaded with several gotchas, but I really don’t see another option.

Washington has historically played catch up on all things technology, but the current administration has published the “AI Bill of Rights” which speaks to many of these topics.

However as of now, they are not enforceable by law, and there aren’t any federal laws that explicitly limit the use of artificial intelligence, or protect us from its harm.

At its core, what we do in post-production is all about storytelling, and AI, as fascinating as it is, is merely another tool in our toolbox. It’s true, AI can analyze data, identify patterns, and even suggest edits. Heck, it can generate content based on predefined parameters. But, no matter how advanced it becomes, it lacks the innate understanding of the human condition and the emotional and cultural context that you, as artists, possess.

To be clear: Don’t believe the job loss hype. AI is not about to take over our jobs. Please don’t fall for the classic “Lump of Labour” misconception that automation kills jobs. It’s simply not true. Technology serves as the spark for productivity enhancement, making people more efficient in their work. This increased efficiency triggers a chain reaction: it drives down the costs of goods and services and pushes up your wages. The net result is a surge in economic growth and job opportunities. But it doesn’t just stop there. It also inspires the emergence of fresh jobs and industries; ones that we couldn’t have imagined just a few short years ago.

In the face of evolving AI technology, the role of editors is not diminishing…but transforming. You are the bridge between the cold calculations of AI and the warmth of human connection. We infuse videos with a depth of storytelling that resonates with audiences, touches hearts, and sparks imaginations. AI cannot replace your creative intuition or your storytelling skills. It’s the human touch that adds the emotional depth, the nuanced transitions, and your profound connection with viewers. Remember that, my fellow creatives, and let’s shape the future of our industry together.

I’m sure you have some input on one or more of these 5 THINGS. Let me know in the comments section. Also, please subscribe and share this tech goodness with the rest of your techie friends.

Even if they are AI.

5 THINGS is also available as a video or audio-only podcast, so search for it on your podcast platform du jour. Look for the red logo!

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe. 

Editing & Motion Graphics: Amy at AwkwardAnthems.

Today we’re going to take a deep dive into the various ways to edit remotely with Adobe Premiere Pro, when you or your team, plus your computers and media just can’t be in the same place at the same time. Let’s get started.

Team Projects in Premiere Pro – as well as for After Effects – has been around for quite a while. And it’s free!

Team Projects is Adobe’s solution for creatives who each have their own local edit system– either at the office or at home – and a local copy of the media attached to that edit machine. Meaning, no one in your team is using any shared storage. Everyone accesses a Project that Adobe hosts in the cloud. And because Creative Cloud is managing the Team Projects database, versions and changes are tracked.

Overview of Adobe Team Projects

Of course, this workflow does require discipline, including organizing media carefully and utilizing standardized naming conventions.

But once you’re in the groove, Team Projects is very easy to use.

Let’s take a quick look, so you can see how the flow goes.

You can start the process when you have Premiere Pro Open.  Give the project a name, and then add Team members as collaborators with their email addresses. They’ll get a desktop notification through Creative Cloud that they’ve been added to the Team project.

Be sure to check your scratch disks on the 3rd tab correctly – as every team project editor will be saving their files to their own local storage.

Let’s fast-forward till we have an edit we want to share.

In your Team Project pane, you’ll see a cute little arrow at the bottom right of the pane, that tells you to share your changes in the team project.

Don’t worry if you forget, if you look sequence name tab, and see an arrow, that’s a reminder to share and upload your changes.

Click the “Share My Changes” button, and you’ll see all the stuff you’ll be sharing with your team members. Add a comment if you wanna summarize what you did. Click “Share”.  Premiere Pro will then upload your changes to your Team’s Creative Cloud account.

Your Team members will then open the Team Projects they’ve been invited to through the Creative Cloud Desktop app.

Don’t worry – if any media files are marked offline in Premiere, team members can either relink to that media if they have it locally, or you can download them from within Premiere Pro via the Media Management option in Premiere.

As you can see, this is where the aforementioned Scratch disks, media management, and organization really come into play – or else you’ll be relinking all day.

Now, this is just the project, sequences, and media.  What about Review and Approve with your Team? With the Adobe acquisition of Frame.io last year, Team Projects now adds review and approval capability inside Teams Projects.

Despite the fact Team Projects has been around for a while, it’s still an excellent solution that is already part of your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, so there is no extra cost to test it out.

Adobe Productions is the evolution of the “Shared Projects” feature Adobe rolled out in 2017 and it differs significantly from Adobe’s Team Projects. 

While the workflow with Team Projects expects each user to have their own local workstation and local copies of the media, Productions operates assuming that everyone on your team is already connected to the same shared storage. This would be akin to having all your creatives in the same building, and all of them mounting the same NAS or SAN volumes to their machine. Because everyone can access the same media at the same time, there is no need to copy media back and forth from your local drive to the shared drive. It saves a ton of time.

Overview of Adobe Productions

The trick to make this work is to have a software “traffic cop” working in the background and watching over every user opening what Adobe calls a “Production”.

A Production is essentially a sup’d up Premiere Pro project file that points to several smaller project files. The smaller project files are what each editor works with, and all changes are saved to the smaller projects within the primary Production.

The software traffic cop in Premiere allows users to work on a Project within the Production – and locking or unlocking the Project when needed to prevent over-writes or corruption of the files.

We start with starting a new Production within Premiere Pro.

We set a folder, and thus any Projects put within this Production folder will be part of the production. This is stored on the single shared storage volume everyone is using, and with the same media repository, everyone is reading from.

Now, when you load up the project within the production, you might notice the layout looks a bit odd.  Let me demystify it for you.

The various icons and their function inside an Adobe Production

We’re used to “Bins” in Premiere Pro Projects.  In Productions, we call it a “Folder”. Also, in Premiere Pro, we’re used to seeing “sequences.” In Productions, we call them “Project Files”.

I know that takes some getting used to. What will help, is that the Production pane in Premiere looks a lot like your folder structure at the desktop level. So, unlike Teams, where we have the media organization on disk, which can be different than the media organization within your project, Productions more closely resembles the “what you see is what you get” method when you organize at the OS level.

Adobe Productions on disk and inside Premiere Pro

We only have time for a few features here, but those who have worked in other collaborative editorial software will recognize some of the features of Productions – such as green and red icons, which tell you at a glance if the project is not in use and you can edit project or not.

If this organization sounds familiar, it is. While Productions was a huge new feature for Adobe, this workflow was popularized prior by Avid, and their Media Composer software connected to their proprietary and 3rd party shared storage. You’ll also notice that an Adobe Production is much like an Avid Project file, in that an Adobe Production links to Adobe Project files in very much the same way an Avid Project links to Avid Bins.

The future, my friends, is here and Adobe has embraced it for many years now.

When deployed properly, all your Windows workstations running Premiere Pro in the cloud connect to a pool of shared storage, which is also in the cloud. As every editor has access to the same shared storage at the same time, the experience mimics that of the on-premises Productions workflow we talked about a few short minutes ago.

Overview of using Premiere Pro in the cloud

Now, you have the option of selecting and configuring your cloud workstations and appropriate cloud-shared storage, plus 3rd party collaboration tools for your cloud editing fortress, or you can use one of several companies that have already built that fortress so all you have to do is move your stuff in.

If you’re rolling your own cloud deployment, we have Adobe’s guide on Creative Cloud deployment on Virtual Desktop Infrastructures. These guides spell out requirements and best practices for deploying on AWS, Azure, and GCP platforms.

Close attention should be paid to Adobe’s notes talking about what types of machines to use, what types or tiers of cloud storage to use, what screen sharing protocols to use, and what workflows simply aren’t ready for prime time, like high fidelity color grading or surround sound audio. These guides provided by Adobe aren’t meant as a cookbook, but rather as bullet points for you cloud folks to get busy.

For all-in-one solutions, I can’t recommend BeBop Technology highly enough. They are by far the most advanced and mature platform for using Adobe in the cloud. With fast shared storage, enterprise security, plus on-demand and live review and approve tools. All you do is bring your software licenses, and BeBop does the rest. Plus, you pay the actual cloud costs, not marked-up costs by a 3rd party.

As someone who chose to work for BeBop for nearly 4 years because of just how far ahead they were than anyone else, this is by far the best all-in-one solution.

Other popular solutions include AWS’s Nimble Studio, albeit with some caveats on availability and features around the world, and that you’re pretty much on your own to administer it. AWS also has its Workspaces solution, but the Workspaces feature set really isn’t robust enough for post-production.

A slew of other companies has popped up, who simply tie into the APIs of various clouds and then present you a web front end so you can easily spin up and spin down machines. These are normally for VFX rendering or single-user usage, rather than real-time collaboration with shared storage and teams of users…all in the cloud.

You will need to accept the truth that doing anything in the cloud will have fluctuations in cost from month to month.

Working entirely in the cloud is not an “all-you-can-eat” for one price. The cloud is pay-as-you-go, and every workstation hour, server hour, and every MB stored or downloaded costs money.  Expect several hundred dollars per editor in total cloud costs per month – even before your Adobe software costs.

It is, however, cheaper than renting a local edit and storage rig.

I’m sure many of you have gotten into the groove of remoting into a system. That is, working from home in front of a terminal or workstation, and connecting to an editing machine back at the office.  This is often the first thing facilities try when going remote because your team can use the same editing computers and storage they’ve always used. And it can work well if your home network and the office infrastructure are robust enough.

Overview of remoting into the office

This normally involves the facility creating a VPN – or Virtual Private Network – on the company’s firewall so editors outside the four walls of the facility can reach their machines behind the firewall. It also means the firewall will need to have specific ports opened, so screen-sharing protocols can do their screen-sharing thing.

One of the top screen-sharing solutions that Adobe, Avid, and others support is Teradici’s PCoIP or PCoIP Ultra protocol, now owned by HP. Great quality, killer security, and is dead simple for the end user. 

Parsec, now owned by Unity, is another flexible solution with a ton of user controls.

I suggest staying away from screen-sharing protocols that are meant for IT-type usage, like Team Viewer, Apple or Microsoft Remote Desktop, and VNC, just to name a few.  True, they are inexpensive but are not optimized for sync audio and video, color fidelity, or full frame rates.

Now, we have to briefly talk about the laws of Physics.

Due to the law of physics, you can’t be on the other side of the planet from your remote editing machine and expect to have a pleasurable editing experience. With few exceptions, ya gotta be on the same continent, and within about 1500 miles of the workstation to keep your sanity. For you ping nerds out there, ideally you wanna be under 60ms or 70ms roundtrip. And of course, the lower the ping number, the more likely you are to have a pleasurable editing experience.

As is the case with most so-called “standard” workflows, there are always hybrids. Hybrid methodologies address unique remote and technology scenarios, they may also address other gaps in the facility at the same time, or simply make workflows even more flexible. And while I can’t cover every single permutation, here are a few to be on the lookout for.

My first hybrid tool is LucidLink. LucidLink is cloud storage that understands the difference between the metadata of media, and the media itself, coupled with smart caching.  Using that approach, LucidLink can grab the media Premiere Pro needs, but only grab *that frame* of media that is being requested. This means you don’t have to download the entire file in order to edit with it. Plus, that file caches on your system and will be played automatically when the NLE needs it instead of going back to the cloud. It’s awesome.  LucidLink can work with on-premises edit machines, or with cloud VMs making it a great add-on for increased flexibility.

Next, we have Postlab, which is part of Hedge software.  Postlab gives Premiere Pro editors the ability to sync project files, tasks, bookmarks, and media stored in Postlab drive to editors anywhere in the world using Postlab’s cloud servers. Postlab also locks Premiere Pro projects when in use by another team member, so nothing gets corrupted or lost.

Moving up the food chain, Asset Management could be a solution for you.  Everyone struggles with how to organize, catalog, search, and retrieve their media.  Well, what if you had an asset management system that could handle those chores *and* stream proxies from your storage at the office or in the cloud to your local computer running Premiere Pro at the same time?  It’s much like Adobe’s former enterprise solution Adobe Anywhere, which, as luck would have it, was the first ever 5 THINGS episode way back in 2014.

IPV’s Curator product has this feature as an add-on, as does Arvato Bertelsmann’s Edit Mate product.  Both are enterprise, and both are meant for much more than remote editing.

Have more remote editing with Adobe concerns other than just these 5 questions? Ask me in the Comments section. Also, please share this tech goodness of this *entire* series with the rest of your techie friends.

5 THINGS is also available as a video or audio only podcast, so search for it on your podcast platform du jour. Look for the red logo!

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe. 

All of you are asking the same thing. “How can I edit remotely or work from home?” Today we’ll look at Avid, as they have many supported options, so you can cut with Media Composer from just about anywhere. Let’s get started.

The first method we’ll look at is simply extending your desktop, that is – having your processing computer at the office, while you work from home and remote into that machine. This has been the crutch that most facilities have relied on in the past few weeks. Let’s examine how this works.

First, this scenario assumes that you edit at a facility, where all of the networked computers and shared storage are…and that you can’t take any of those things home. This can be due to security, or other concerns like needing access to hundreds of TB of data.

In this case, the creatives are sent home, and I.T. installs a remote desktop hardware or software solution on each of the machines. The creatives then connect through a VPN or virtual private network – to gain secure access from their home editing fortresses of solitude back into the facility and attempt to work as normal.

Now topically this sounds like a real win-win, right? You get access to your usual machine and usual shared storage. Sure, you lose things like a confidence monitor (if you had one), but you should be fine, right?

The devil, as always, is in the details.

Typical screen sharing software solutions that are installed on your office editing machine are often dumpster fires for creatives. I’m not saying they are bad for general I.T. use, or when you need to remote in and re-export something, but by and large most screen sharing protocols do not give a great user experience. Full frame rate, A/V sync, color fidelity, and responsiveness usually suffer. Solutions like Teamviewer, Apple or Microsoft Remote Desktop, VNC, or most any of the other web-based solutions fail. Hard. You’ll pull all of your hair out before you finish an edit.

Moving up to more robust solutions like HP’s RGS – Remote Graphics Software – or a top of the line solution like Teradici’s PCoIP software – is about as good as you’re gonna get. The license cost may cost a few hundred dollars, too…depending on your configuration.

But here’s the kicker. They’re Windows only as a host.

While you can access the computer running the Teradici software with a macOS or Windows equipped computer – or even via a hardware zero client –  the environment you create in will always be a Windows OS.

Quite unfortunately, there does not exist a post-production-creative friendly screen sharing solution for macOS.

The only solution I’ve come across over these many years is a company called Amulet Hotkey – yes, that’s their name – who take the Teradici PCoIP Tera2 card and put it into a custom external enclosure and add some secret sauce.

You then feed the output of your graphics card, plus your keyboard, mouse, and audio into the device and the PCoIP technology takes over. It’s quite frankly the best of both worlds: PCoIP and macOS.

This ain’t gonna be cheap.

Expect a few thousand dollars per hardware device, and availability at the moment may be difficult. You also going to need to do some network configuration for Quality of Service, and then decide how you’re going to “receive” the screen share at home, either on a laptop/desktop or with a zero client.

There is no doubt that as a Media Composer user, you’ve already tried this. It’s the easiest and least expensive way to have multiple users working on Avid projects at the same time while not in the same building.

Wait a second. Let’s back-up and review how this works before we jump into the nitty-gritty.

We start off as we did before, with everyone working at the facility on networked computers and shared storage. We then begin to replicate the media from the facility on to portable drives.

Obviously, this could be a security risk and could potentially break the contract your facility might have with the content providers.

But that’s a soapbox I’ll get on later in the episode.

Replicating the media will require some serious media management. This means an accounting system to track who has what media – as well as a tight versioning schema. You’ll need to look at syncing schemas to get new media out to users, unless the editor is coming back to the facility for updated content.

This may or may not also include someone at the facility creating lower resolution proxies so editors can go home with a few TBs of media instead of dozens of TBs of media. Often this may include watermarks on the media as yet another level of accountability in the event of a leak.

Once that media is at home with the editor, there has to be a standardization on folder organization, naming conventions, and an extreme amount of attention paid to media management.

Avid has always had a fantastic way of project management. Projects link to any number of bins, and those bins contain sequences, and both point to media. This means bins are small files that can be emailed or dropboxed or otherwise shared with other users quite easily. Provided each user has the appropriate media, Media Composer can be coaxed into relinking to the media when a new bin is loaded.

This workflow does present some gotchas. Any rendered files will most like need to be re-rendered on each machine, and multiple users can’t work on the same bin or at the same time with the usual red lock/green unlock ability, so there does have to be some communication so as not to mess up someone else’s work.

Avid Bin Locking – Red Lock & Green Unlock

Obviously you’ll need to have a computer with a licensed copy Media Composer, plus the plugins you may need. Maybe you’ll have an awesome company like the reality post facility Bunim Murray who sent the editors home with their edit bay computers. Or, maybe you’ll have to grit your teeth with that old laptop collecting dust in the garage. Or, maybe – just maybe – you have the time and budget for the next few solutions.

This next solution is new-ish to the Avid family and has traditionally only been something you did within the 4 walls of your facility, and out to your edit bays – not to your home.

Avid Media Composer Cloud | VM

BTW, trivia tidbit – the vertical line you see in many Avid naming conventions? It’s called a Pipe. Make of that what you will.

Media Composer Cloud | VM involves investing in a stack of servers at your facility and running VMs, or virtual machines, on these stacks of servers. On these VMs, a specially licensed copy of Media Composer Ultimate runs. Now, typically this is done so only everyone within the facility can access their computers, Media Composer, and shared storage from anywhere in the facility, and I.T. can administer everything from 1 location. No need to have computers in each of the bays. It’s sort of like the old tape room methodology.

As everyone is in the same facility, latency is cut down, plus, using tools like Teradici’s PCoIP software solution give the user a very fluid creative experience.

Recently, some facilities have been asking the question: “if our users are simply remoting into the VMs while they’re here in the office, why can’t they do the same at home?”

As you can imagine, quality of service and the user experience are paramount in the Avid world, so this was usually discouraged. In fact, as of this video, Avid still only recommends this for users within a facility. But that hasn’t stopped folks from trying it and using it.

So, users go home, and on their laptop or desktops, they load up their Teradici PCoIP software client, and connect via a VPN back to the facility mothership and continue working – much like we covered in option #1: Extending your desktop.

There are a few caveats, however.

This is not a “light ’em up tomorrow” solution. This requires specific servers, specific switches, and specific builds. Expects tens of thousands of dollars. It also requires upgraded licenses…not just for Media Composer, but many 3rd party software solutions and plugins either don’t handle virtualization well or want to charge you for the privilege. And playing with 3rd party storage may not be pleasant.

And since you use the Teradici PCoIP handshake to access the VMs, the virtualized environment is *only* Windows.

Ahh, ahh – stop it. There’s no crying in tech.

Teradici PCoIP, while a fantastic protocol, does have some limitations when it comes to creatives. Higher-end color grading may be difficult, as PCoIP is limited to 8bit viewing, although the newer Ultra variant does have 10bit capability. Audio is usually limited to stereo playback, and don’t expect a confidence monitor output – it’s just the computer GUIs.

But for most editing purposes, it’ll work just fine.

This solution has actually been around for many years, but it was just called something different and was mainly found within news type deployments.

The premise is pretty elegant. If Avid MediaCentral UX – formerly branded as Interplay – was already your asset management du jour and managing and tracking your media at your facility, why couldn’t it serve up that media to you on-demand wherever you were?

And thus, Avid devised what is now known as Media Composer | Cloud Remote.

Media Composer Cloud | Remote, when coupled with MediaCentral | Production Management, allows servers at your facility to serve up real-time proxies of your on-premises media out to your remote machines.

The end-user has a full version of Media Composer and connects over a VPN back to the facility. The user checks out a project from the server, which is linked to media on Avid NEXIS shared storage back at the facility. When the local version of Media Composer attempts to access media, the local software retrieves that media from the server at the facility and streams a low res version in real-time to your local machine.

You are literally playing media in your timeline that’s being served up from hundreds or thousands of miles away – all within the familiar environment of Avid.

Here’s the best part: Your local copy of Media Composer can run on either Windows *or* macOS.

Avid Media Composer Cloud | Remote also has the added bonus of allowing remote users to work with their local media and then uploading in the background that local media back to the facility and checking it into the shared storage so others can access that media.

It’s a pretty slick solution.

However, Cloud Remote is simply a software option on top of Avid’s MediaCentral | Production Management solution. Meaning: remote editing with streamed proxies is not the main selling point of the system – it’s the asset management, automation, and collaborative features that drive companies to invest in it, with remote editing as an add-on. It’s like buying a house because it has a really cool garage.

It’s also not cheap, nor easy to administer. You’re going to need an Avid ASCR to handle it, plus stacks of servers and storage. Expect over $100K to get going.

Once configured however, it’s tech elegant and very cool.

Edit on Demand was a relatively quiet beta solution by Avid, and it’s only really been viable for the past year. It’s available in early access and “by-request-only”.

In essence, Avid | Edit on Demand is accessing Media Composer software that is running in a public CSP – or cloud service provider. In this case, Microsoft Azure. The application, the NEXIS storage, and everything you need to edit with is in the cloud – and you access it via a laptop, desktop, or a zero client. It’s very similar to the method I talked about earlier: Virtualizing and Extending with Media Composer | Cloud VM. The difference here is that everything is in the cloud – not at your private facility.

Let’s take a look.

We’ll start where we’ve started every workflow: the traditional edit-at-a-facility.


We then take that infrastructure and virtualize it within the Microsoft Azure cloud – and only on Windows desktop. Editors get to use Media Composer Ultimate and they get access to NEXIS storage, so bin locking and project sharing works as you would expect it to. It’s then business as usual.

Like the other virtualized scenarios, this solution is also built on Teradici’s PCoIP, so the user experience is fantastic. Avid has also partnered with File Catalyst to enable users to upload and download content to and from the cloud NEXIS.

This type of solution allows productions to scale up and down quickly as needed and plays right into OpEx business models…which the film and TV industry is famous for. At last check, Avid was able to get these workstations and environment ready in under a week.

And because it’s in the cloud it allows users to work all around the world.

The usual caveats apply: there is no video monitor output currently, and audio is still limited to stereo audio. And no, Pro Tools is not supported in any cloud. It’s also not easy to get other applications installed on the workstation or direct administrator access to the NEXIS storage.

Pricing starts around $3000 per user per month, assuming under 200 hours of workstation a month. You can also buy hours and users in bundles, as well as TBs of storage.

And while this price is a little steep for freelancers, it certainly is the fastest way to get to scale quickly and without a large CapEx investment.

While available technology certainly frames what can and cannot physically be done, we’re still hampered by stagnant security restrictions and guidelines, and outdated work environment expectations.

Many of the security requirements that are jammed into contracts are outdated and have not been revised, namely because no one wants to question it and potentially lose a large client. The looming worry of a hack, which is more often than not simply a password that was socially engineered, creates paranoia and the stacking of security protocols on top of more protocols.

Mark my words, you’re gonna see a serious revamp of security recommendations after this is over, and quite frankly, before this is over. I’m also hopeful that once these security guidelines are revisited and revamped, that facilites begin to realize that if you hired someone to represent your company, your brand, and generate the work that gets you paid, you’d trust them to work remote in some capacity.

Have more Avid Remote Editing concerns other than just these 5 questions? Ask me in the Comments section. Also, please share this tech goodness of this *entire* series with the rest of your tech friends….they’ve got nothing else better to do right now.

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe. 

On this episode of 5 THINGS, we gonna get hiiiiiigh! In the clouds, with a primer on using the cloud for all things post-production. This is going to be a monster episode, so we better get started.

We in the Hollywood post industry are risk-averse. Yes, it’s true my fam, look in the mirror, and take a good hard look and realize this truism.

Take the hit.

This is mainly because folks who make a living in post-production rely on predictable timetables and airtight outcomes. Deviating from this causes a potentially missed delivery or airdate, additional costs on an already tight budget, and quite frankly more stress.

The cloud is still new-ish, and virtually all post tasks can be accomplished on-premises. So why on earth should we adopt something that we can’t see, let alone touch?

Incorporating the cloud into your workflow gives us a ton of advantages. For one, we’re not limited to the 1 or 2 computers available to us locally. This gives us what I like to call parallel creation, where we can multitask across multiple computers simultaneously. Powerful computers. I’m talking exaFlops, zettaFlops, and someday, yottaFlops of processing power….and have more flopping power than that overclocked frankenputer in your closet.

Yeah, I said it. Flopping power.

It’s also mostly affordable and getting cheaper quickly.

To be clear, I’m not telling you post-production is to be done only on-premises or only in the cloud, most workflows will always incorporate both. That being said, the cloud isn’t for everyone. If you have more time than money, well then relying on your aging local machines may be the best economical choice. If your internet connection is more 1999 than 2019, then the time spent uploading and downloading media may be prohibitive. This is one reason I’m jazzed about 5G…but that’s another episode.

Now, let’s look at some scenarios where the cloud may benefit your post-production process.

Alright, let’s start small. I guarantee all of you have used some form of cloud transfer service and are storing at least something in the cloud. This can take the form of file sharing and sync applications like Dropbox, transfer sites like WeTransfer, enterprise solutions like Aspera, Signiant, or File Catalyst, or even that antiquated, nearly 50-year-old format known as FTP.

Short of sending your footage via snail mail or handcuffing it to someone while they hop on a plane, using the internet to store and transfer data is a common solution. The cloud offers numerous benefits.

Hard Drive Life Expectancy

First is what we call the “five nines”, or 99.999% availability. This means that the storage in the cloud is always available and with no errors, with a max downtime of about 5 ½ minutes a year. In the cloud, five-nines are often considered the bare minimum. Companies like Backblaze claim eleven nines. This is considerably more robust than say, that aging spinning disk you have sitting on your shelf. In fact, almost a quarter of all spinning hard drives fail in their first 4 years.

Ouch.

I completely get the fact that the subscription or “rental” models are a highly divisive subject, and at the end of the day, that’s what the cloud storage model is. But you can’t deny that the cost that you get to spread out over years (also known as Opex, or operating expenditure budget) is a bit more flexible and robust than the one time buy out of storage (known as CapEx, or capital expenditure budget).

Which brings us to the next point, which is “what are the differences between the various cloud storage options?” Well, that deserves its own 5 THINGS episode, but the 2 main points to know is that the pricing model covers “availability”, or how quickly you can access the storage and read and write from it, and throughput, or how fast you can upload and download to it. Slower storage is cheaper, and normal internet upload and download speeds are in line with what the storage can provide. Fast storage, that is, storage that gives you Gigabits per second for cloud editing with high IOPs can be several hundred dollars a month per useable TB.

This is why cloud storage is often used as a transfer medium, or as a backup or archive solution rather than a real-time editing platform. However, with the move to more cloud-based applications, the need for faster storage will be necessary. With private clouds and data lakes popping up all over, the cost for cloud storage will continue to drop, much like the hard drives cost per TB has dropped over the past several years.

Cloud storage also has the added benefit of allowing work outside of your office and collaborating in real-time without having to be within the 4 walls of your company. Often, high-end firewalls and security, are, well, highly-priced, and your company may not have that infrastructure…or the I.T. talent to take on such an endeavor. Relying on the cloud for that security is built into your monthly price. Plus, most security breaches or hacks are due to human error or social engineering, not a fault in the security itself. Cloud storage also abstracts the physical location of your stored content from your business, making unauthorized access and physical attacks that much harder.

The next logical step in utilizing cloud resources is to offload the heavy lifting of your project that requires Flopping Power.

The smart folks working in animation and VFX have been doing this for years. Rendering 100,000 frames (about an hour’s worth of material, depending on your frame rate) across hundreds or thousands of processors is gonna be finished much faster than across the handful of processors you have locally. It’s also a hellova lot cheaper to spin up machines as needed in the cloud then buying the horsepower outright for your suite.

Before you begin, you need to determine what you’re creating your models in and if cloud rendering is even an option. Typical creative environments that support cloud rendering workflows include tools like 3DS Max, Maya, Houdini, among others.

Next is identifying the CSP – cloud service provider –in this case, the big 3: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud that supports a render farm in the cloud.

Once you have your CSP selected, a user establishes a secure connection to that CSP, usually via a VPN, or virtual private network. A VPN adds an encrypted layer of security between your machine and the CSP. It allows provides a direct pipe to send and receive data to your local machines and your CSP.

From here, a queuing and render management software is needed. This is what schedules the renders across multiple machines and ensures each machine is getting the data it needs to crunch in the most efficient way possible, plus recombining the rendered chunks back together. Deadline and Tractor are popular options. What this software also does is orchestrate media movement between on-premises, the storage staging area before the render, and where the rendered media ends up.

Next, the render farm machines run specialized software to render your chosen sequence. This can be V-Ray, Arnold, RenderMan among many others. Once these frames are rendered and added back to the collective sequence, the file is delivered.

I know, this can get daunting, which is why productions traditionally have a VFX or Animation Pipeline Developer. They devise and optimize the workflows so costs are kept down, but the deadlines are hit.

This hybrid methodology obviously blends creation and artistry on-premises, with the heavy lifting done in the cloud. However, there is a more all-in-one solution, and that’s doing *everything* in the cloud.

The VFX artist works with a virtual machine in the cloud, which has all of the flopping power immediately available. The application and media are directly connected to the virtual machine. Companies like BeBop Technology have been doing this with apps like Blender, Maya, 3DS Max, After Effects, and more.

DISCLAIMER: I work for BeBop because I love their tech.

Transcoding, on the other hand, is a much more common way of using the horsepower of the cloud. As an example, ever seen the “processing” message on YouTube? Yeah, that’s YouTube transcoding the files you’ve uploaded to various quality formats. How this can be beneficial for you are for your deliverables. In today’s VOD landscape, creating multiple formats for various outlets is commonplace. Each VOD provider has the formats they prefer and are often not shy about rejecting your file. Don’t take it personally, often their playout and delivery systems function based on the files they receive being in a particular and exact format.

As an example, check out Netflix requirements.

The hitch here is metadata. Just using flopping power to flip the file doesn’t deliver all of the ancillary data that more and more outlets want. This can be captioning, various languages or alt angles, descriptive text, color information and more. Metadata resides in different locations within the file, whether it be an MP4, MOV, MXF, IMF, or any other the other container formats. Many outlets also ask for specialized sidecar XML files. I cannot overstate how important this metadata mapping is, and how often this is overlooked.

You may wanna check out AWS Elastic Transcoder, which makes it pretty easy to not only flip files…but also do real-time transcoding if you’re into that sorta thing. Telestream also has its Vantage software in the cloud which adds things like Quality Control and speech to text functions.

There are also specialty transcoding services, like Pixel strings by Cinnafilm for those tricky frame rate conversions, high quality retiming, and creating newer formats like IMF packaging.

Audio and video editing, let alone audio mixing and video grading and finishing, are the holy grail for cloud computing in Post Production. Namely, because these processes require human interaction at every step. Add an edit, a keyframe, or a fader touch all require the user to have constant and repeatable communication with the creative tool. Cloud computing, if not done properly, can add unacceptable latency, as the user needs to wait for the keypress locally to be reflected remotely. This can be infuriating for creatives. A tenth of a second can mean the difference between creativity and…carnage.

There are a few ways to tackle editing when not all of the hardware, software, or media is local to you…and sometimes you can use multiple approaches together for a hybrid approach.

First, we have the private cloud, which can be your own little data center, serving up the media as live proxy streams to a remote creative with a typical editing machine. True remote editing.

Next, have the all-in approach – have everything, and I mean absolutely everything – is virtualized in the cloud. The software application, the storage, and you access it all through a basic computer or what we call zero clients.

Lastly, we have a hybrid approach. Serve the media up in the cloud to a watered-down web page based editor on your local machine.

Each has its pros and cons.

Both Avid and Adobe have had versions of an on-premises server serving up proxies to remote editing systems for many years. The on-prem server – a private cloud, for all intents and purposes – serves out proxy streams of media for use natively within an Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro system connected remotely. Adobe called it Adobe Anywhere, and today the application is…nowhere. The expensive product was shelved after a few years. Avid, however, is still doing this today, using a mix of many Avid solutions, including the product formerly known as Interplay, now called Media Central | Cloud UX, a few add on modules, along with a Media Composer | Cloud Remote license. It’s expensive, usually over $100K.

Back to Adobe, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention 3rd party asset management systems that carry on the Adobe Anywhere approach. Solutions like VPMS Editmate from Arvato Bertelsmann, or Curator from IPV are options but are based around their enterprise asset management systems, so don’t expect the price tag to be anything but enterprise.

The all-in cloud approach, meaning your NLE and all of the supporting software tools and hardware storage – are running in a VM – a virtual machine – in a nearby data center. This brings you the best of both worlds. Your local machine is simply a window into the cloud-hosted VM, which brings you all the benefits of the cloud, presented in a familiar way – a computer desktop. And you don’t have the expensive internal infrastructure to manage. This is tricky though, as creatives need low latency, and geographical distance can be challenging if not done right.

A few companies are accomplishing this, however, using robust screenshare protocols and nearby data centers. Avid has Media Composer and NEXIS running on Azure and will be available with Avid’s new ”Edit on Demand” product. BeBop Technology, is accomplishing the same thing, but with dozens of editorial and VFX apps, including Avid and Premiere.

Disclaimer: I still work for BeBop. Because their technology is the sh&t.

Some companies have investigated a novel approach: why not let creatives work in a web browser to ensure cross-platform availability, and to work without the proprietary nature that all major NLEs inherently have? This is a gutsy approach, as most creatives prefer to work within the tools they’ve become skilled in. However, less intensive creative tasks, like string-outs or pulling selects performed by users who may not be full-time power editors is an option. Avid adds some of this functionality into their newer Editorial Management product. Another popular choice for web browser editing is Blackbird, formerly known as FORScene by Forbidden Technology.  This paradigm is probably the weakest for you pro editors out there. I don’t know about you, but I want to work on the tools I’ve spent years getting better at.

Alas, Mac only based apps like Final Cut Pro X are strictly local/on-premises solutions. And while there are Mac-centric data centers, often the Apple hardware ecosystem limits configuration options compared to PC counterparts.  Most Mac data centers also do not have the infrastructure to provide robust screen sharing protocols to make remote-based Apple editing worthwhile.  Blackmagic’s Resolve, while having remote workflows, still requires media to be located on both the local and remote systems.  This effectively eliminates any performance benefits found in the cloud.

1 second in both audio and video

Audio, my first love, has some way to go. While basic audio in an NLE can be accomplished with the methods I just outlined, emulating pro post audio tools can be challenging.

Audio is usually measured in samples. Audio sampled at 48kHz is actually 48000 individual samples a second. Compare this to 24 to 60 frames a second for video, and you can see why precision is needed when working with audio. This is one reason the big DAW companies don’t yet sanction running their apps in the cloud. Creative work with latency by remote machines at the sample level makes this a clunky and ultimately unrewarding workflow.

Pro Tool Cloud is a sorta hybrid, allowing near real-time collaboration of audio tracks and projects. However, audio processing and editing is still performed locally.

On to Finishing and Color Grading in the cloud. Often these tasks take a ton of horsepower. And you’d think the cloud would be great for that! And it will be…someday. These processes usually require the high res or the source media – not proxies. This means the high res media has to be viewed by the finishing or color grade artist. These leaves us with 1 or 2 of unacceptable conditions:

But NDI you cry! Yes, my tech lover, we’ll cover that in another episode.

While remote grading with cloud media is not quite there, remote viewing is a bit more manageable. And we’ll cover that…now.

Review and approve is one of the greatest achievements of the internet era for post-production. Leveraging the internet and data centers to house your latest project for feedback is now commonplace. This can be something as simple as pushing to YouTube or Vimeo or shooting someone a Dropbox link.

While this has made collaboration without geographic borders possible, most solutions rely on asynchronous review and approve…that is, you push a file somewhere, someone watches it, then gives feedback.

Real-time collaboration, or synchronous review and approve – meaning the creative stakeholders are all watching the same thing and at the same time, is a bit harder to do. As I mentioned earlier, real-time, high-fidelity video streaming can cause artifacts…out of sync audio, reduced frame rates, and all of this can take the user out of the moment. This is where more expensive solutions that are more in line with video conferencing surface, popular examples include Sohonet’s Clearview Flex, Streambox, or the newer Evercast solution.

However, In this case, these tools are mostly using the cloud as a point to point transport mechanism, rather than leveraging the horsepower in the cloud.

NDI holds a great deal of promise. As I already said, we’ll cover that in another episode.

Back to the non-real time, asynchronous review and approve: The compromises with working in an asynchronous fashion are slowly being eroded away by the bells and whistles on top of the basic premise of sharing a file with someone not local to you.

Frame.io is dominating in this space, with plug-ins and extensions for access from right within your NLE, a desktop app for fast media transfers, plus their web page review and approval process which is by far the best out there

Wiredrive and Kollaborate are other options, also offering a web page review and approve options.

I’m also a big fan of having your asset management system tied into an asynchronous review and approval process. This allows permitted folks to see even more content and have any changes or notes tracked within 1 application. Many enterprise DAMs have this functionality. A favorite of mine is CatDV who has these tools built-in, as well as Akomi by North Shore Automation, which has an even slicker implementation and has the ability to run in the cloud.

As a bonus cloud tool, I’m also a big fan of Endcrawl, and online site that generates credit crawls for your projects without the traditional visual jitteriness from your NLE, and the inevitable problems of 37 credit revisions.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reached out via text or email or shared my last personal video. It means more than you know.

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe.   Thanks for watching.

On this episode of 5 THINGS, we’re checking out the 2018 Mac Mini from Apple, and the new eGPU Pro offering from Blackmagic and …well, Apple. We’re also running benchmarks against your favorite (or least favorite) NLEs: Final Cut X, DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Avid Media Composer. Let’s get to it.

NOTE: The eGPU Pro in this episode was a pre-release, beta model. Your results may vary with the shipping version.

What better machine to test how well an external GPU works than on a machine that has a horrible built-in GPU? Yes, tech friends, the powerful top of the line 2018 Mac Mini is built on Intel technology, which means there is a small GPU on the chip. While this GPU, the Intel UHD Graphics 630, isn’t going to break any performance records, it does provide a user with a basic way to feed their screen without a 3rd party graphics card.

The Mac Mini also rocks USB-C for Thunderbolt 3 access. It’s this 40Gb connection that provides the bandwidth for an eGPU to shine. Slower I/O, like Thunderbolt 2 or even older connections, simply don’t provide enough bandwidth to accommodate all that a modern GPU can provide. The new Mini provides four USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, enough for up to 2 eGPUs. I also dig the legacy USB 3 ports, too…as we all have peripherals like keyboards and mice that still rock the legacy USB type A.

Back to throughput, the 2018 Mac Mini also has an option for a 10GigE copper connection. I know, many signify 10GigE as a sign that it’s “for professionals”. Quite frankly, 10GigE is the new 1GigE, so if you haven’t been looking into it, now would be a good time.

The Mini has many different options, from an entry level i3 processor to the midrange i5, to the i7 model that l I tested with. The units can be configured with 4 or 6 cores, and speeds of up to 4.6GHz in Turbo Boost Mode. For RAM, the 2018 Mini supports up to 64GB, although you may need to take it to an Apple store to get it installed. You can also build your system out with up to a 2TB PCI SSD.

My testing unit was the 6 core i7, with 32GB of RAM.

I ran some benchmarks on the Mini and compared the results with other Geekbench scores of other popular Apple machines.

Here, we have a top of the line 2013 Mac Pro, and a maxed out 2017 MacBook Pro, plus my Hackintosh build from a few episodes back. You can see the 2018 Mac Mini is apparently no slouch when it comes to performance. Plus, it helps that the last Mac Pro is over 5 years old, too.

Let that sink in for a minute.

During testing, I was alerted to the fact that the Mini will throttle the chip speed when the unit hits 100 degrees (Celsius), so if you push the system too hard, the performance will suffer.

That kinda blows.

There are a ton of in-depth 2018 Mac Mini reviews out there, and let’s face it, you’re really here for the eGPU Pro and video post-production stuff…so let’s move onto that…now.

Like the non-pro model before it, the eGPU Pro from Blackmagic simplifies the addition of enhanced graphics processing by putting a GPU in an external enclosure. Also, like the previous model, the Pro has an 8GB card in it, albeit with a faster 8GB card than the Radeon Pro 580 in the previous gen. The new GPU is the Radeon RX Vega 56. Both models are meant to capitalize on the Metal playback engine, although they will apparently utilize OpenCL or CUDA.  Given the future of both of those last two standards on the Mac platform….best start getting used to Metal.

The eGPU Pro also features a Display Port, unlike the non-Pro version. This allows for up to 5K monitoring if you so desire…as the HDMI 2.0 port tops out at 4K DCI at 60fps. Both units come with 4 USB 3.0 ports and a spare USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port so you can connect even more peripherals through the eGPU.

Now this sucker is damn quiet. Aside from a small, white LED indicator at the bottom of the unit, and an icon in the menu bar, you wouldn’t even know the unit is running.

The Blackmagic eGPU Pro is very quiet. The only physical indicator is a small white LED at the bottom.

The unit is a mostly a massive heatsink, so expect heat to come pouring out of the top.

The eGPU Pro ships with a 1 foot USB-C cable. This cable is VERY short, which means this unit is always going to be next to your computer.

While I didn’t test it, I understand longer USB-C cables can cause issues, so stick with the cable that came with it.

It’s imposing. So is the size of the Blackmagic eGPU Pro.

While the eGPU Pro is cool looking, it‘s pretty hefty and does take up valuable desktop real estate. It also dwarfs gear next to it, like the Mac Mini. In fact, it’s larger than a 2013 Mac Pro, among other….things.

What is uniquely different, however, is that the eGPU Pro is only certified to work with Mac OS 10.14 Mojave. I like this, as support in OS 10.13 High Sierra for eGPUs was a crapshoot at best. Interestingly enough, nothing needs to be installed in Mojave for the eGPU Pro to run – the GPU drivers are built into the OS. In fact, the eGPU Pro comes with no drivers or software to install.

I tested with a pre-shipping model of the Pro –in fact, the packaging was still for the non-pro version. As such, there was no documentation or quick start guide with the unit.

The ship date for the eGPU Pro has now slipped a month from November 2018 to December 2018; perhaps code is still being written for Resolve and FCPX, as I did find some issues. Let’s check that out now.

Please check out the video for specifics!

Powergrades by Jason Bowdach to bring the Resolve system to it’s knees.

Please check out the video for specifics!

Avid Media Composer disables all GPU effects as the Mac Mini’s onboard GPU fails to meet Media Composer’s requirements.

Lots of data to crunch!

It’s obvious that despite the initial high benchmarks via Geekbench, the 2018 Mac Mini, on its own, doesn’t really have a fit for creative uses in Post, unless it’s used as a file server, or perhaps a lone Mac in a sea of Windows machines when you need an easy way to create ProRes files. I concede that it may work for story producers or preditors, but I find that it’s never a good practice to hit the upper limits of a new machine from day 1.

I should also note that the 2018 Mac Mini is not qualified by all NLE manufacturers.

Avid hasn’t qualified it as of now.

It doesn’t meet the minimum specs that Adobe publishes.

The Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Configuration Guide calls out specifically that the Mini should not be used.

Apple’s requirements for Final Cut Pro X, on the other hand, are barely met by the Mini.

Personally, I’d save the $2000 this machine costs and put that towards an iMac or iMac Pro, or perhaps the highly anticipated 2019 Mac Pro.

Now, as for the eGPU, it’s important to remember that all of this is new. This was essentially a science experiment. Mojave, as of this episode, is only at 10.14.1. Apple, one of the partners in this eGPU collaboration, still doesn’t have all of the bugs worked out, as Compressor doesn’t appear to utilize it. That being said, speed increases in FCPX and Resolve are undeniable and certainly showcase the speed a good GPU can bring to the post table.

Adobe, while not part of the Apple/Blackmagic eGPU soiree, also shows speed benefits out of the box – and that’s before Adobe has done any optimization for it. That’s pretty impressive.

Avid, on the other hand, has never been a GPU powerhouse. My tests only really showed that Avid has some serious engineering to do to incorporate eGPUs into future releases.

If this eGPU Pro solution could breathe life into an old system, I might be more inclined to suggest it…however, the fact that you need a relatively recent Thunderbolt 3 enabled machine makes that “old system” label inappropriate.

Now, you can ‘roll your own’ eGPU, by using a 3rd party external chassis and compatible graphics cards. They can be parted out and purchased for under $800 on the street…$400 cheaper than the eGPU Pro. While I don’t expect an all in one solution to be the same cost as a DIY, a $400 delta is too big of a chunk to ignore.

The only real time I can suggest a solution like this is for those folks who edit on a MacBook or a MacBook Pro. Those road warriors who are on the go and editing but need to come back home base at some point and do some serious heavy lifting. But is that market large enough? Gaming and other GPU enabled applications have a much wider reach than the Post community.

Regardless, I’m excited to see if in 12-18 months NLEs have been able to start utilizing eGPUs better than they do from day 1.

Have more Pro eGPU and Mac Mini questions other than just these 5? Ask me in the Comments section.

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe.   Thanks for watching.

On this episode of 5 THINGS, I’ve got a few tricks that you may not know about that will help you upload, manage, and make YouTube do your bidding.

You probably have media on YouTube, and you probably think that after thousands of hours, you’ve mastered the ‘Tube. But there are some little-known upload tricks and workarounds, playback shortcuts, and voodoo that you may not even know that YouTube does.

Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say you’ve got a masterpiece of a video, maybe it’s an uncle getting softballed in the crotch, maybe it’s your buddy taking a header down a flight of stairs, or maybe, just maybe it’s the cutest pet in the world. MINE.

Lucy: the cutest, bestest pet in the world.

…and the world needs to see it, right? And you export a totally-worth-the-hard-drive-space-huge-monster-master-file so you don’t lose 1 bit of quality.

And that’s OK.

Now, in actuality, it’s not the most efficient, but let’s save that existential technology discussion for another episode.

Did you know that YouTube will actually take this massive file? That you don’t need to shrink it, recompress it, or otherwise use the presets in your transcoder du jour? YouTube used to publish a page that specified video file sizes and data rates for “enterprise” grade connections. Ostensibly, this was so companies with fat internet connections could upload massive files. After all, YouTube re-compresses all files anyway. Yes, as I’ve said many times before, YouTube will ALWAYS recompress your media. ALWAYS.

“Enterprise” video bitrates for YouTube. These are 5-6x LARGER than what YouTube recommends for typical users.

But, this page was taken down.

Why?

Because accepting larger files sizes ties up YouTube’s servers, and takes longer for their transcoding computers to chomp through and subsequently create the versions you’ll end up watching. Plus, it’s a crappy experience for you, the end user, to wait hours for an upload AND the processing. Despite this, you can still do it.  In the above video,  you can see I have an HD ProRes file, and it’s several GB. As I select the file and start the upload, YouTube tells me this will take several hours. That sucks. However, uploading a less compressed file means the versions that YouTube creates will be based on higher quality than the compressed version you’d normally export and upload from your video editor or one that you’d create from your media encoder.

YouTube creates all of your media variants…so you don’t have to.

So what would you rather have…a copy of a copy of your finished piece? Or just 1 copy? The less compression you use, the better looking the final video will be.

More on this here: A YouTube user uploads, downloads and re-uploads the same video to YouTube 1000 times and the compression is staggering.  This is called “generational loss”.

By the way, you know that YouTube creates all of your various versions, right? From the file you upload, YouTube creates the 240, 360, 480, 720, 1080 and higher versions. Are yours not showing up? Have patience. YouTube takes a little bit.

OK, back to the high res fat files. I know, the fact there is a long upload for these large files sucks, but it does lead me to the next tip. Did you know you can resume a broken upload?  As long as you have the same file name, you can resume an upload for 24 hours after a failed upload. In the video above, let me show you. Here’s the file I was uploading before. As you can see, it still has quite a way to go. Oops, closed my tab. Now, I’m gonna wait a little bit.

OK, it’s been several hours, and I’m going to open a new tab and navigate back to the upload page. Now, I’ll reselect the same file. The upload picks up where it left off, and the file continues to upload.

Great for when the internet goes out.

I’ve been a massive proponent for video captioning for years. Mainly for making tech information more accessible to as many people as possible, but also because it does boost the visibility of your videos via SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Now, engines like Google not only index the tags you assign to the video but also the objective content that’s heard in the video…what’s being said.

Now, YouTube’s captioning is not foolproof. If the audio recording quality is poor, or if there are a lot of slang terms or names, the auto-captions may be wrong. However, the auto-captions are a great start, because not only do they attempt to get stuff right, but they also TIME the captions for you. After YouTube does it’s best to auto-caption, you now can either use YouTube’s built-in transcript and caption editor to fix mistakes and further stylize the timing, but you can also download that same transcript and use it in your NLE, so you can have a caption file on any other platform you like.

Many other professional VOD outlets or platforms accept closed captioning as embedded captions, or even as sidecar files. This also means you can turn the text of your transcript into an accompanying blog post. In fact, that is what I do for this web series and podcast. Another hack is that if you have scripted content or a teleprompter script, you can upload that to YouTube as well. YouTube will then time the script you have against the video you’ve uploaded, and convert the script into captions…which once again, you can download and use.

As a side note, I have a tutorial on how to accomplish this very thing, turning your script into timed captions using Youtube…check it out. It’s not only a massive time saver but also a way to boost your SEO ranking and give you content for a webpage.

Keyboard shortcuts are your friend. The mouse is wholly inefficient and only serves to slow you down. Have no fear, the smart folks at YouTube have incorporated many of the shortcuts found in your NLE into YouTube. Let’s check some of ‘em out.

Let’s start with the old reliable “J”, “K”, “L”, or rewind, play/pause, and fast forward.

J = rewinds 10 seconds.

K = play/pause.

L = forwards 10 seconds.

What about Spacebar for play/pause? You betcha.

My favorites are frame by frame playback, especially when you’re trying to deconstruct that brand new movie trailer that just dropped, or trying to emulate and reverse engineer an effect from someone else’s video. For that, use the comma key to nudge 1 frame at a time in reverse. Conversely, you can hit the period key to do a 1 frame advance. You can also add the shift key to adjust the playback globally. Shift + the period key speed playback up 25%, and hit it again to boost playback to 50% faster. The reverse is also true for the shift + comma key combo. 75% speed, 50% speed, and so on.

Here’s a good list for you to earn some muscle memory for.

Now, if you spent any amount of time on Netflix, you’ve probably stumbled across this window, too.

Or come across this substantially more involved window: A/V Stats.

Advanced Netflix Stats: Display A/V Stats (Ctrl + Shift + Alt + D)

YouTube has something very similar; a handy-dandy “stats for nerds” window.  When playing back a YouTube video, right click on the player window. From this menu, select “Stats for Nerds”.

Right click on the player window to load YouTube’s “Stats for Nerds”.

An overlay window will pop up in the upper left showing you sorts of nerd goodness. This may pacify your need for numbers, but it’s also a great troubleshooting tool for playback issues. You may notice in this overlay the heading “Volume / Normalized”.

This is something very sneaky which will we’ll go into….now.

A little-known secret is that not only does YouTube always re-compresses your video, it also diddles your audio work. And I don’t mean just a simple transcode, I’m talking about adjusting your audio levels and sonic dynamics. More specifically, Loudness Equalization. You can see this in the last tip, when we checked out stats for nerds, this is what the “Volume/Normalized” heading is. YouTube analyses the audio present in your video and makes a determination if the volume at certain places – or overall – in your video needs to be adjusted for a pleasurable level of playback for the viewer.

YouTube is messing with your audio!

In this example, you can see the first percentage is the volume in your YouTube player window, the second percentage is how much normalization adjustment is being applied by YouTube; or how much of the volume is being reduced. The last number is the “content loudness” value, which is YouTube’s estimate of the loudness level.

Now why on Earth would YouTube do this?

It goes back to something I mentioned earlier, and that’s user experience. If you had to constantly change the volume on your headphones, your computer speakers, or your TV for every video you watched, you’d get pretty annoyed, right? It’s also quite dangerous to have one video that’s very quiet, so you turn the volume up, only to have your ears blown off when the next video that plays is super loud. A variant of this is actually part of the CALM Act, which holds broadcasters accountable for the same thing.

You’re probably asking, “how can I stop YouTube from doing this to my mix?”

Well, just like avoiding YouTube from re-compressing your video… you can’t!

However, what you can do is minimize the audio tweaking YouTube does so as much of your artistic decision on loudness is retained. You can start by metering and mixing your audio using the Loudness Units relative to Full Scale, otherwise known as LUFS. YouTube doesn’t release exact values, and reports differ, but YouTube tends to shoot for -12 to -14 LUFS, so try and keep your audio in that ballpark to reduce the amount of tinkering that YouTube does. That being said, aiming for a specific integrated loudness doesn’t work, reliably. Experiment and see what sounds good to your ears.

LUFS metering with Izotope’s Insight.

Further reading on YouTube, audio compression, and LUFS:

Now, there may be a point in time when you decide to do some advertising, or perhaps make recommendations to your friends or clients on advertising. This is where Adwords can go from simple to difficult very quickly. But what if I told you about hyper-focused marketing techniques that are not too difficult?

Let’s assume you know the basics of Adwords. At a very, very high level, of the kinds of AdWords you can create, are an in-stream video ad, either skippable or not, before the start of a video or, create an in-display ad, which appears as a suggested video to the right in the YouTube sidebar of the video you’re currently watching.

There are more parameters to setup within Adwords, but you basically give Adwords a budget, and that budget is used by Adwords to bid on your ad placements on your behalf against other advertisers.

You’re probably asking, “But how do I have my ads placed on the RIGHT videos?”

Here’s where the tricks come into play. Adwords allows you to not only bid on the general types of videos you can place your ads on, like folks interested in sports, or technology, but you also have the ability to specify what exact videos and channels where your ad is shown on. Provided those videos or channels you wanna advertise on accept monetization, you can selectively choose to advertise on them. This gives you hyper-focused marketing.

Adwords allows you to selectively show your video ad on a specific video OR channel.

And what’s to stop you from doing a custom intro for each of the commercials you place? This allows you to speak to the exact users consuming the video and market directly to them. Think about that for a minute. You can reference the content in the exact video you’re advertising on. You can speak to the people who are watching that exact video. Instead of casting a wide net, you cast a narrow, highly targeted advertising bullet. We’re talking assassin type precision.

Do you have more YouTube tips and tricks other than just these 5? Tell me about them in the Comments section. Also, please subscribe and share this tech goodness with the rest of your techie friends. They should thank you and buy you a drink.

Until the next episode: learn more, do more.

Like early, share often, and don’t forget to subscribe.   Thanks for watching.