In Broadcast - May 2020 - 46

46

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 10 - Issue 5 | May 2020

InMedia

Editing and More
in the Cloud
Contributing Editor Andy Stout looks at
the important role that remote editing and
cloud distributed workflows are playing...
Arvato VPMS EditMate is built on the Vidispine API

T

here are few technologies in the
broadcast industry that have
had their time in the sun under the
current coronavirus pandemic to the
extent that remote editing has. While
production has shuddered to a halt
worldwide, suddenly the necessity
to spin up distributed workflows that
are able to process the content that is
already in the can has fallen into the
category of extremely urgent.
And there is a lot of it too. As part
of its Q1 2020 earnings call, Netflix
revealed that it had 200 shows alone
going
through
post-production;
widen that scale out to the entire
global broadcast industry and you
can see why the investment has been
worthwhile. One of the reasons it has
been able to happen so quickly is that
the establishment of remote workflows
has been an acceleration of programs
already in development as post houses
seek to accommodate the growing
wishes of talent for more flexible
working conditions and struggle with
city centre rents.
The cloud is an integral part of this.
Few remote workers will have the
computing horsepower needed to
work on high end projects in their
spare rooms, so being able to spin
up computational resource has been
essential. That said, cloud-based
remote editing cannot quite yet be
considered to be an enterprise without
challenges; there are a few pinch
points along the way. Material needs

to be constantly available, instantly
accessible, and security is a must.
Indeed, to satisfy the most demanding
strictures of the top-end of content
security best practise, sensitive
material sometimes has to be kept on
physically different servers from other
projects.
Bandwidth will always be an issue even ultrafast broadband has trouble
coping with uncompressed 4K media
files - but when it comes to the cloud
there are a growing number of
companies whose services can enable
the new breed of distributed editing
workflows, both in terms of the cloud
services they offer and the toolsets
that run on them. Some of them are
fairly deeply embedded across the
industry too; Brightcove's list of
integrated partners into its array of
services is an impressive one and
includes Adobe, Forbidden, Grabyo,
and MixMoov amongst others, all of
which can hook into the company's
Video Cloud product.
Cloudian points out that 60% of
Tier 1 storage is typically consumed
with inactive files and that companies
can get NAS capacity back without
disruption by moving them to the
cloud. There is, of course, a cost
involved there too, but at scale the
company says this can be as low as
0.5 cents per GB per month, so as
usual the advice is to work out what
you need on what Tier carefully and
effectively de dupe (de-duping alone
can claw back up to 50% on storage
costs in a typical installation).
The company promises fast
data access - billed as 100x
tape - for that money and uses
the industry-standard S3 interface
so it is compatible with most editing
platforms and MAMs.
Scality's RING promises to lower
TCO by allowing a mix and match
of industry standard off-the-shelf
servers, offloading SAN storage and
Scality RING enabling video transcoding in-place.
orchestrates data across clouds It's
interesting technology that

manages to orchestrate data across
on-prem, private and public clouds,
and recognises the dual demands
that see enterprise and public clouds
being used more and more for core
workloads while data generation and
usage migrates to the edge. And,
of course, it can be coupled with
the company's Zenko multi-cloud
data controller which allows media
companies to manage complex data
workflows across disparate storage
platforms and across hybrid and multicloud environments
Back before the current crisis blew
up, the Arvato-owned Vidispine added
the Bitmovin high-speed chunk-based
cloud video encoder to its Vidinet
service. It's all part of an expansion
that is seeing Vidinet become an ever
more capable and multifunction cloudbased media services platform, which
is especially true when users move
beyond plug and play and into the API.
The Vidispine API includes most of the
necessary metadata data framework
to build smart ingest and delivery
methods for any chosen NLE, with
several examples already existing on
panels made for Adobe Premiere.
Signiant CEO Margaret Craig made
the unusual step of announcing that
the company would waive any fees
from users breaking through its
subscription tiers until the end of
May as they adapted to new ways
of working. The company has over
500,000 global users so that is a
substantial amount of potential
revenue lost, but it was not alone
amongst technology
companies looking
to help kick-start
remote workflows.
Elsewhere, frame.
io offered 90-days
worth of 2TB extra
storage for free,
Avid offered free
90-day licenses to qualified
customers, and Sohonet said
it would upgrade its ClearView

FlexGo remote collaboration tool
to enable more viewers and higher
quality streaming. In terms of actually
moving the content around, Harmonic
also pledged to make its EyeQ contentaware encoding technology free up to
the middle of July, pointing out that
it can reduce streaming congestion
on broadband networks by up to 50%
without impacting quality
Admittedly, a lot of these moves
were not entirely altruistic - new
custom is new custom after all - but
they did have the effect of adding
further accelerant to the market. And
frame.io is one of those companies
that looks to have already been a bit
further ahead of the curve than others,
already boasting Premiere Pro, FCP
X and DaVinci Resolve integrations
that let users pull assets right into
their project and/or timeline. Remote
colour grading is, of course, a whole
new ball game over and above remote
editing and notoriously tricky to pull
off, not only technically but also in
terms of effective collaboration and
communication regarding the look of
the project.
This is where technology from
companies like BeBop Technology
comes to the fore. Not only does it
supply virtualised high-end remote
workstations capable of being loaded
with industry standard tools and
running on a comparatively puny
20Mbps connection, but it syncs with
BeBop Over the Shoulder for realtime full screen review and approval
coupled with voice chat.
Bebop virtualised
workstations
and more

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