The New Normal of Cloud-Based Editing
- By Andy Stout
Contributing Editor Andy Stout looks at the important role that remote editing and cloud distributed workflows are continuing to play…
The last time we looked at the subject of editing in the cloud we were still in the fairly early days of Lockdown One. The immense task of pivoting towards remotely managed, cloud-based workflows was still a fairly new thing and, while it can hardly be said to be a done deal just yet, the amount of work done in the past year to establish robust pipelines in the industry has been nothing short of heroic. Indeed we’ve got to the point where it’s probably hard to imagine a future where the industry heads back to its city centre bricks and mortar cost centres, even if the sushi tends to be a bit better than working from home.
“A year on it’s clear that, for many, a lot of the changes made as a result of the pandemic are here to stay,” comments Karsten Schragmann, Head of Product Management at Vidispine - An Arvato Systems Brand. “While some of the typical practicalities in implementing a solution could be bypassed or overruled by urgency a year ago - budget, resource, complex workarounds - with a longer-term view many of those issues are now rising back up the priority list. We’ve proved the technology works, now it needs to be convenient and cost-effective.”
Vidispine’s most recent contribution to these ongoing efforts has seen enhancements to its EditMate Production Asset Management system, which uses clever streaming tech to enable Adobe Premiere Pro users to work from anywhere with what Schragmann refers to as a “local” experience. “We also made our browser-based video editor, VidiEditor, available on our VidiNet media services Platform as a Service (PaaS), to provide an on-demand cloud-based editing for journalists and other users not needing the full functionality of a craft NLE and we have a major update to VidiEditor coming shortly in May this year,” he says.
Blackbird was always tapped to be one of the companies that would most benefit from any pivot to remote editing workflows thanks to its cloud-native video editing platform, and so it has proven. Recent high-profile wins for the company include further expansion in the news departments of US TV stations, where it’s now up to an enviable tally of 69, and being placed at the heart of the EVS workflow for two upcoming global summer and winter sporting events, which have to remain nameless for the usual endorsement reasons.
CEO, Ian McDonough, maintains that being cloud-native is an important part of the company’s appeal, especially as more and more broadcasters start to figure carbon neutrality into their purchasing decisions. The figures are actually quite startling. In a recent white paper, Blackbird claims that not only would it produce 91% less carbon than an on-premises solution during a two-week sports event, but that it would also produce 6x less than a conventional cloud-based system.
“The very well known big brands that were on-premise NLEs and lifted and shifted their processes from on-prem to the cloud, they generally have to throw a lot of processing power and actual power to move a lot of high bitrate content around in order to have those toolsets in the cloud,” says McDonough. “Not only are they cost-heavy they need a lot of expensive equipment - they need GPU machines, they need a lot of bandwidth, they need storage in the cloud and locally, they also generally need a subscription to a Teradici service in addition to the cloud hosting service - so there are quite a lot of pain points for them. It’s also very carbon inefficient because much of the carbon that is emitted from these processes is data transfer; moving high bitrate HD content and higher from A to B across fibre is very, very power-hungry and takes a lot of carbon.”
In the past year, McDonough says Blackbird has put a lot of work into becoming “bulletproof” when it comes to interoperability and slotting into disparate technology stacks, and there’s the next generation of its codec, Blackbird 10, in the wings which promises twice the quality and half the data rate. “That will provide another revolution in quality and efficiency,” he says.
The carbon message is echoed at Vimond IO by EVP, Glenn S. Pedersen, and Product Manager, Paul Macklin. “First and foremost it must be cloud-native, and by that we mean built utilising services that react and offer resources to users on-demand, with no latency for increased capacity or requirements for pre-charging and without any orchestration layer,” they say. “Building a virtual machine in the cloud is not going to cut it in the long run, it is not the SaaS experience customers expect and the underlying costs mean the business model doesn’t stack up.
Building cloud-native is the only way to ensure we drive down the industry’s environmental impact.”
They contend that one of the biggest challenges with cloud editing systems is not to replicate the workflows we have in an on-premise environment just because we are used to it. “We now have the chance to rethink and change the way we work and how we produce content,” they say, reasoning that in three or four years’ time workflows will reside there fully, only moving content out for delivery as required.
Product-wise, Vimond IO constantly looks to flatten its learning curve to enable broadcasters to deploy a cloud editing service to a large number of users with very low investments or training. It has also recently focused on adding security and is working with third parties to assess it to provide a SaaS product that customers can trust with their high-value assets.
“We’ve launched the fastest rendering engine in the market removing the need to think about rendering or time-consuming exports,” they say.
“When a story needs to be published in multiple versions, from TV to social media, the editor does this within the same story, no need to version multiple times. It’s all about focusing on the story and being able to publish it the quickest way possible without sacrificing quality. This means a 60-minute clip can be produced in three variants simultaneously in under 3 minutes. If one, ten, or one hundred users need to export at the same time, there is no stopping them and no slowing them down.”
For post and high-end broadcast production, Avid has recently introduced Avid | Edit On Demand, a cloud subscription service that promises a user experience virtually indistinguishable from editing on-prem.
Post production teams can spin up virtualised Media Composer systems with Avid NEXIS cloud workspaces in a matter of hours, access their workflows from anywhere, and shut them down when projects are complete.
“One advancement required to meet the needs of future markets is the commercial model,” explains Raul Alba, Director of Product Marketing - Media and Cloud. “As an industry, we need to be more granular in how we’re scaling up and down. If you need 50 more licenses for two weeks, you should be able to get 50 more licenses for two weeks, but this isn’t currently the case.
“Another is the ability for customers to self-serve,” he continues. “When we deploy something in the cloud for a customer, it still requires a lot of customisation to adapt to their needs. We want to apply the self-serve model of Avid | Edit On Demand to the wider workflow to make the whole user experience much better.
“For example, if you’re covering a big sports event, you shouldn’t need to engage in discussions six months in advance about what you’ll need to purchase and how you’re going to deploy it.
“We want to shorten the time and complexity and make it easy for customers to scale up and down.”
“Pre-COVID-19, we found most businesses wanted an on-premise technology solution or a hybrid on-prem/cloud solution - post COVID-19, the majority of our new business has been hybrid or fully cloud-hosted deployments,” comments Ryan Hughes, Product Marketing Manager at IPV.
He identifies an impressively long list of cloud editing pain points, including the need for reliable (and in the case of PCoIP solutions, very fast) internet connections, the lack of direct connections to high-performance storage and the high-res assets that reside on them, and technological issues around certain workflows, such as using Alpha channels, where typically only the original high-resolution asset will work.
“Curator’s high-quality streaming proxy editing on just 2Mbps in Premiere Pro and the ability to send the conform/export job into a cloud-hosted Adobe Media Encoder server (and therefore removing the burden from the editor’s local machine) are key to Curator’s remote editing capabilities, and enabled hundreds of editors using our solution to work from home virtually overnight when the pandemic set in, even for those with low-cost internet connections,” he says.
Recently, the company has also added greater flexibility for editors by giving them the ability to tell Premiere Pro which specific assets in their bin to load when they open their project; this lets editors work in ways they’re used to - i.e. adding all the assets to their bins they may need in their edit - but avoids the need for Premiere Pro to load them all, drastically reducing load times for remote workflows.
And as those remote workflows take firmer root, IPV is also looking at ways of minimising the loss of the usual over-the-shoulder collaboration that editors have historically been used to.
“Curator’s project sharing and versioning capabilities with Check-Out/Check-In are enabling editors to edit and collaborate remotely on projects without fear of overwriting their colleague’s work,” says Hughes. “When you’re not in the office working together, features like this make remote collaboration, sharing ideas, and fast turn around much easier.”
