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COVID-related internet throttling
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It’s a lot relinking media, but you point premiere at the proxies and it relink to them. You can then setup a button to view either original or proxy media.
It’s worth checking out:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/ingest-proxy-workflow.html#Progresspaneldialog
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As this story keeps twisting, Techcrunch raised the typically optimistic (and typically naive, I fear) notion that the current conditions may force (force? really?) ISPs to lift data caps forever. If they can lift data caps temporarily and nobody really suffers for it, they’ll be the ones pointing at their own emperor’s lack of clothes — the idea of “bad actors” sucking up the broadband and forcing the rest of us to slow down turns out to be less than a straw man and more of a flat-out lie.
Exuberance notwithstanding, a provocative read as he makes the case that there’s just no need for the caps that most of us had taken for granted: Coronavirus could force ISPs to abandon data caps forever
The larger issue for most of us isn’t the amount of data we pull down as the limits we face on download speed. The article makes an interesting case about how far down the shell game continues. Comcast has a gigabit plan for some folks, but it also comes with a 1TB data cap — which you’d blow through in three hours of top speed, give or take. After that, penalties come in, and speeds go down.
That’s my math, but I wonder if any of you are on this plan? Or any kind of truly high-speed connection? Definitely not me.
And fwiw, here’s a rundown of the major ISPs who are, and aren’t, lifting caps. I discovered that mine didn’t have a cap, but they’re offering free broadband to households with students who don’t already have access, and they’re throwing in a couple of weeks of Showtime and EPIX for everyone. Sure, thanks. Totally makes up for the slow, spotty service.
Anyway, now that we’re another couple of weeks along from where this conversation began, how’s your internet doing?
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I’m incredibly thankful that I had the opportunity to upgrade to gigabit fiber a few months before this all went down.
It’s probably too late to try and upgrade but I highly recommend looking closely into your options when you can. My neighbor is suffering with a cable provider at the moment and it was news to him that we even had access to fiber.
Darby Edelen
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Hi Darby –
so with your wonderful fast 1G internet connection, are you downloading the full resolution
video media from your server, or production companies footage, and editing this media ?Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
I’m not an editor. I primarily use After Effects and Cinema 4D for motion graphics and compositing. Some Nuke as well.
Generally what I’m doing is mounting the media shares on my home PC and working with local project files that reference the remote footage. After Effects and Nuke will cache used footage locally in the background.
I’m also using Splashtop to remote into my PC in the office but that has its own challenges due to mismatched monitor resolutions and sub-optimal multi-monitor support.
Which of the approaches I use depends on what a given project requires.
My connection isn’t generally providing 1Gbps, especially as my home PC is connected via WiFi. I usually see transfer rates in the range of 15-50 MB/s which isn’t anywhere near the theoretical limit of around 120 MB/s. It is much better than my previous service though which operated in the 0-8 MB/s range and was less reliable. I have seen transfer rates as high as 90 MB/s on a wired connection but unfortunately my router is not in an accessible location for work.
Darby Edelen
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[Bob Zelin] “so with your wonderful fast 1G internet connection, are you downloading the full resolution
video media from your server, or production companies footage, and editing this media ?”And if he was trying to edit full resolution files remotely, I can only imagine the poetically hyperbolic abuse you’d be hurling at him. “Don’t you know about ProRes? Don’t you know about proxy workflows?” Only with a lot more punctuation and all caps. ????
I know for geezers like you and me, Bob, it wasn’t that long ago that uncompressed was the Holy Grail. Shoot uncompressed, edit uncompressed, maximum quality, simple workflow, nothing could be easier or better. Until it wasn’t. LOL Forget about camera compressed HD. Along comes Avid with DNxHD right after thre turn off the century, cue Apple guys laughing at the absurdity of cinema quality compressed workflow, delivery, and archiving until along comes ProRes four years after that, and nowadays, uncompressed doesn’t look quaint or quirky or romantic like shooting film. It looks like you don’t know what you’re doing.
Even RAW is hardly RAW the way we originally understood it. And sure, you CAN edit 8K RAW, but apart from a demo at some already fossilized future trade show, why would you? There’s certainly no reason to insist in these (hopefully) unusual circumstances that this is the only right way to edit, or even the most desirable one if you could.
I think we’ve acknowledged that there may come a time when one socially isolated individual needs to make his or her way to the office to push a couple of buttons to relink the full res media and send it on its way… but it appears that as long as the media is actually mounted somewhere, even that may be less necessary than we thought just a few weeks ago.
So for you folks who are actually managing these kinds of remote workflows, we’ve talked about products and platforms, but how does full res media enter into the picture? Does it?
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[Tim Wilson] “So for you folks who are actually managing these kinds of remote workflows, we’ve talked about products and platforms, but how does full res media enter into the picture? Does it?”
You seem to be suggesting that remote workflows are here to stay as the norm. I highly doubt that. Post is highly collaborative – as in face-to-face. Yes, there are ways around that, but they are highly inefficient and often more costly. I don’t see that improving in the least. Will some of these current methods be with us in a revised form? Sure. Will they be the norm? I highly doubt it, unless there is an overriding need for that. It will be an option. In anything, facility owners will have better “plan Bs” for the next such event.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Still think we can move everyone to the cloud for business?”
I know I’m late to this but I’ve been swamped with crisis communications for a large local credit union client.
What scares me today regarding the avilablity of bandwidth is that many of the smarter governors (and I’m specifically referencing Cal Gov Newsome here – have already publicly said they are working on trying to integrate distance learning initiatives into the public school system, as we speak.
Imagine the bandwidth that will need to be deployed to live stream real-time lessons to all the students of a major system like the California Public Schools.
I just looked it up. There are just under 7,000 elementary and middle schools involved. I did some napkin numbers and came up with roughly 1.4 million daily streams (ave. 25 kids a class) IF each grade “team teaches” all the students rather than trying to do separate class by class.
And to the best of my knowledge, nobody has curriculum that’s ready to deploy to supplant the current “individual teacher lesson plans” for their classroom – which takes consideration of different learning speeds and modes.
I’m sure there are panic meetings happening right now at the Board of Education level down to the district and individual schools levels in case the public schools need to remain closed for months.
But you can bet this will be a MASSIVE undertaking and could easily disrupt the load profile of even the big gun services like AWS, Aspera, Azure, etc.
1.4 million school kids logging on every morning to take classes is NOT a trivial idea.
And I’ll just note that when I had my education product selling into schools, a few years ago the primary access platform was Zoom.
You might want to have a back-up collaboration pipeline available for your work, just in case.
FWIW.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Bill is 100% correct, and I just wrote Oliver about something similar (about bandwidth and the cable companies). We all talk about “the next big thing” – be it 3D, HDR, 8K, 16k. But there is only one “next big thing” – the pipeline, that needs to be run by the cable companies. I cannot ever conceive that the current owners (Spectrum, Comcast, Cox, RCN, AT&T, etc.) will ever do this. You need someone with a vested long term interest (like Amazon, Google, Apple) that is willing to buy these companies out, or pay off whoever needs to get paid off, so they can run fiber lines – not into people’s homes, but into businesses that are willing to pay for it (which is probably everyone). And these companies will be able to quadruple their rates, and businesses won’t care, because true remote workflow will become a reality. It is so clear now, that this is what everyone wants (and what everyone really wanted long before the Covid-19 crisis) – but now it’s truly evident.
As for “uncompressed quality” – most of see what’s going on. It’s the separation of “wealth and poverty” in our industry. For some, YouTube and h.264 and the iPhone is more than good enough. And for the others – 4K is (all of a sudden) not good enough, and WE HAVE TO SHOOT IN 8K. And when 16k comes out, it will be 16K, because 8K is not good enough (remember, we have to use an ADO, because no other DVE is good enough, we have to use an AVID Symphony because a Media Composer is not good enough) – most of us lived through this nonsense. It’s never going to change.
As for 5G ? Well – Tim can tell us about that more than anyone else now. But of course, that won’t be the ultimate solution for what we are talking about.
Bob
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
[Oliver Peters] “You seem to be suggesting that remote workflows are here to stay as the norm.”
“Here to stay” and “the norm” are two separate things with no conflict whatsoever. Everybody, and I mean everybody, had built workflows that were “ready for anything that we’d need to deal with.” Guess what? That generally didn’t include this, and now it’s going to have to.
It’s a matter of perspective. When I lived in the Florida Keys, we didn’t consider a file truly backed up unless it was stored higher than the 100 year flood level (11 feet, which was harder to accomplish than most people think), and accessible if there was no power and the sherriff had set all the traffic going one way, out of town, which means it had to be north if me That may sound ridiculous, but I needed to access files exactly this way every couple of years, and one year, had to do it twice. I stayed in business when other colleagues had to leave the business altogether.
That’s where we are now. Yes, creativity is collaborative. Yes, we’ll go back to how we did things a couple of months ago at the earliest possible opportunity. If history teaches its anything, we know that some of our friends and loved ones will die because they go back too quickly.
But in no circumstances will we go all three way back, with never a thought again to even one member of the team working offsite. The future will include more of both, in spades.
My worry isn’t necessarily that we won’t crack this nut. It’s that bosses WILL figure it out, and find a way to make our lives more miserable as a result. It’s already hard enough to unplug from email. Soon you’ll take a sick day and the boss will remind you that you spent half of 2020 working in your pajamas, so don’t even thinking of pushing out that deadline just because you have the “regular” flu.
Look, it’s no different then a flood in New York City, which so many people said was never gonna happen, or an earthquake that crushes a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, ditto, or a tsunami that takes out HD tape production, or a ridiculous low speed chase and subsequent trial that pretty much puts an end to daytime soap operas in the English-speaking world. Nobody in our business was planning for those events in advance, but everybody in our business came up with a plan afterward.
Floodwaters recede, we accelerate the move to tapeless, transition to reality TV, we keep rolling because that’s what we do.
What we’re doing here is continue a conversation on a thread that you started. LOL too late to decide you don’t want to talk about it.
And seriously, if there’s or facility anywhere in this country who’s not already actively working on a plan for what happens if current conditions continue, or what to do when it happens again, or when some other crazy unexpected thing disrupts production… you just don’t get to call it unexpected anymore.
Disruptions are pretty much becoming more common than not, aren’t they? LOL Anybody not getting their cows in a row by now, I know that Bob is ready to put an end to social distancing, and I’m sure he will be only too happy to show up at your place with a baseball bat and show you everything you need to know about disruption, and tell you everything hes been learning about remote workflows so that no kid half his age will replace him because they’ve been thinking about this stuff and he hasn’t. He has, RIGHT BOB?
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