InBroadcast - May 2022 - 44

44
www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 12 - Issue 5 | May 2022
InFile
Editing ascends to the Cloud
Creative collaborative workflows
connecting pools of geo-distributed
teams is becoming the new norm in
postproduction - by Adrian Pennington...
O
n the back of both the significant
changes
paradigms brought
the
to operational
about by
pandemic and an increasingly heavy
demand for off-site, remote and
distributed production video editors
need to work on collaborative projects
in disparate locations, and yet still
retain the reliability, operational
speed and quality associated with
traditional editing suites.
The answer is in the Cloud.
" Cloud editing, or editing in the
Cloud, has firmly
level
of being a purely
transcended the
technical
discussion, " says Andrew Wierzan.
VP Product, pixitmedia. " Where
it was once a question of 'could it
work?' we are now in the realm of
'will it work for my business?'
While there are many offerings from
SaaS, IaaS, Managed Services, and
Roll-Your-Own, media, organisations
must be mindful of being locked into
a platform long-term. For creative
businesses to remain cost effective,
agile, leverage the next wave of
technological
adapt
to continually
developments, and
changing
market conditions, this can be easily
overlooked, " says Wierzan.
He says, Cloud is proven to be
capable of delivering performance far
in excess of what many on-premise
facilities would be willing to invest in.
Aside from the challenge of latency
from the datacentre to the creative,
the limiting factor is often how Cloud
is integrated into the overall workflow
or pipeline.
" Hybrid must be a key
for creative organizations
focus
and
technology vendors alike. The
winners will be those who respect
the creative process, and deliver
solutions
that
benefit the overall
creative process. pixitmedia have
been enabling creative organisations
to embrace cloud now for a number of
years, in a hybrid, cost-efficient and
open way. We utilise the performance
of pixstors unified experience across
on-premise, hybrid and cloud, and
with our data management software
ngenea, users can take on cloud
with no vendor lock in, bandwidth or
capacity tax. Our solutions give our
customers the freedom to rapidly
integrate with other pipeline and
workflow software, applications and
Cloud. "
For Editshare, Cloud
editing
is
synonymous with creative, premium
quality editing using storage and
compute resources in the cloud,
controlled from a convenient location
using a remote desktop interface like
Teradici.
" It is a hugely powerful enabler for
genuinely distributed, collaborative
workflows, " says
Tallamy. " It
CTO
economies
also offers
and
Stephen
potential
reduction in
environmental impact. "
At NAB, Editshare launched FLEX,
the framework by which editors can
use their preferred software - Adobe,
Apple, Avid, Blackmagic and more
- on virtual workstations in the AWS
cloud.
" Processing resources are spooled
up as required, for example if you
need a complex render accomplished
quickly. High quality
maintain
proxies
minimise the need to transfer large,
full-resolution files, " explains
Tallamy. " Customers
full
control
over their working
environment and content security,
while gaining all the benefits of
remote working and editing in the
cloud. "
Any
collaborative workflow can
take advantage of the cloud, he says.
There are some limitations around
calibrated monitoring for high-end
grading so that might best be served
by a hybrid model, but certainly cloud
pixitmedia, AWS and Autodesk recently united to power remote finishing in the Cloud
editing delivers real advantages in
'work anywhere', as well as reducing
physical and carbon footprints, and
in the shift towards an opex financial
model, where the costs
of each
project can be clearly defined. It also
allows you to very quickly spin up
additional resources when you need
to meet a temporary demand.
" If the raw material is stored in the
cloud, it makes sense to process it
there, too, rather than introduce the
inefficiencies, costs
and
security
risks of downloading it to remote edit
workstations. "
LucidLink is a fully native cloud
storage system (Cloud
Attached Storage/
S3 object
storage that
LucidLink is at the forefront of cloud
services
secure
built
and
file system
for modern cloud-computing
environments. With LucidLink, any
application, process, or workflow
can benefit from low-cost and elastic
storage.
Its growing list of users includes
production
Final
Pixel, a virtual
studio which is unusual in owning no
physical stage infrastructure.
Dominic Maher, Technical
Artist,
Final Pixel explains, " There's simply
no comparison in terms of
between using physical
servers
Network
NAS) built on
enables
collaborative distributed workflows
for creative teams working with
Adobe Premiere and other leading
NLEs.
LucidLink Filespaces - winner of
a NAB 2022 Award for best Cloud
Computing and
Storage product
is a cloud-native file system
specifically designed for high-latency
environments such as media projects
to increase performance, reduce data
movement costs, and governance.
Users can easily stream data
directly from the cloud, eliminating
the need to download or synchronize.
versus a cloud NAS solution like
LucidLink, but LucidLink also has
the performance of a full cloud NAS
solution with the cost
That
storage.
no-brainer. "
Final
combination is
Pixel's work
ranges
of object
a
from
creating internal presentations with
massive video files to creating final
pixel assets at every stage from previz
to post.
Maher says, " VP is very iterative
in the sense that instead of working
on shots sequentially, you do lots
of different things in parallel and
maybe sometimes out of sequence.
LucidLink
fits
into
that
We're all
perfectly
because the whole process is so
transparent.
working
remotely from assets stored in the
cloud, but with LucidLink it's
like
there is a drive attached to your
machine. "
Accepting that Cloud production
editing
and
remote
are
now a
universal part of content creation,
the impact on workflows risks being
undermined by widespread use of
inefficient methods.
A survey
carried
EditShare launched FLEX -
a framework for cloud editorial
out by Caretta
Research and sponsored by cloud
editing tools developer Blackbird,
cost
storage, offering a
specifically
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://inbroadcast.com/news/pixitmedia-celebrates-aws-partner-status https://inbroadcast.com/news/editshare-introduces-flex
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