Working from home

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

I work with Big Banks and run into similar problems. Their systems and laptops are horribly firewalled that literally nothing works. No Drive, No Cloud, Not even Pen Drives. I feel like gifting them a PC to watch the contents I create for them. Fortunately, I could convince their IT guys to keep a spare test PC in their server room where they could walk up to see the content!

Santanu
https://www.santanu.biz

Santanu Productions, Mumbai
The Swiss Army Knife for All Your Creative Needs

[Michael Hoefler]

Hello
I am reading/watching all the links with a lot of interest. But I want to mention a solution we are using for more than five years successfully for sharing our projects and footage.

I am the only internal editor and I am working with 3 Freelancers. In our studio, we have an old Macpro (2009) acting as a server to provide 24h access to our projects through Resilio Sync.

https://www.resilio.com/sync-business/

It is fast, reliable, and P2P (no cloud server) is needed. We never had an issue, we never lost data, we never had a corrupted project. And it is not expensive.
I wonder, based on our very positive experience, why this is not mentioned as an option here for a remote workflow.

Take care.

Michael

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Michael –

so you are transferring 1TB of data over Resilio sync every evening ?

When your editors need 500 – 600 Gigs for that latest shoot, they just go to Resilio, and download
that 500 – 600 Gigs, and they are ready to edit the next morning ?

Are you working with 4K media ? ProRes, or MXF ?

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Darren Roark]

It is fast, reliable, and P2P (no cloud server) is needed. We never had an issue, we never lost data, we never had a corrupted project. And it is not expensive.

I have AT&T fiber 1gig as of November, 950Mbp/s up and down. Some of the file transfer solutions mentioned cap out around 100Mbp/s which is why I was looking for P2P solutions with end to end encryption.

That and I don’t like the idea of a 3rd party having access to my files. (Zoom was recently called out on this)

If this does fall within the guidelines of MPAA compliance this could be a great solve.

I’m assuming you don’t need to upload files before another user downloads them correct? That alone would be a huge time savings.

[Michael Hoefler]

Hello Bob

Ok. We are working on Corporate video. It may be different from your needs.
Our project data volume is between 50GB and 800GB. We are working with HD, UHD, and 6k BRAW.

First, I do create proxies. The editors sync the proxies and start editing. Then, after they synced the proxies, they start syncing the raw video data. So, over 2 or 3 days, they have even the 800GB of raw data synced to their workstations. There is no need to sync all raw data within some hours. And, we are using Adobe Teams. If we have projects over one or 2TB, they just work with the proxies and me on my workstation open the team project (which has the raw data connected) and export the final videos.

Don’t forget; I don’t have to upload first to a server. It is P2P for over 95% of the time. Sometimes the connection switches to a Relay server. Then the speed is dropping down.
But like with all solutions, the bandwidth has to be fast.

Michael

[Michael Hoefler]

Hello Darren

95% of the time, it is a P2P solution. Sometimes, depending on the connection, firewall settings it uses a relay server. But this doesn’t mean you have to upload. It is just slower because a third server handles the connection.

MPAA compliance. I am not sure about this. We are here in Switzerland and doing only corporate video.
If we have to edit a confidential project we are editing it inhouse.

I don’t know if this solution fits needs outside our small corporate world but I was surprised that a P2P solution is not discussed here at CC.

Michael

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Michael –
thank you for your reply. From my experience, the bandwidth here in the United States is incredibly poor for most users, compared to other parts of the world. A typical “fast” connection of 100 Mb/sec is only 12.5 MB/sec. And even a “fancy” 300 Mb/sec upload speed here is only 37.5 MB/sec – so for most of us here in the US – it’s slow. I don’t care if it’s Resilio or another solution. We are at the mercy of the Internet Service Provider speeds, and they are not good. I have seen true 1G connections from Google Fiber which is not available in most major cities in the United States, and it’s incredible that professionals cannot even purchase this here. This is the “weak link in the chain”.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Greg Janza]

[Michael Hoefler] “I don’t know if this solution fits needs outside our small corporate world but I was surprised that a P2P solution is not discussed here at CC.”

I use Resilio to keep two raids mirrored and it works extremely well. I would imagine it would also work very well for remote editors to stay in sync.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Hoefler] “If we have to edit a confidential project we are editing it inhouse.”

This is one of the things that American producers will need to wrap their heads around in the future. Or they may decide not to, because the current status is working well enough….

…but the reality is that many VFX and post houses are contractually forbidden from connecting their project machines to the internet. Access to working suites are by keycard, and only a few people have access. ALL of them need to be onsite, even if only one at a time. There’s no getting around this.

Maybe that will work out well enough, but it seems unnecessary to me. It’s only a movie. The world won’t end if somebody sees a superhero’s new leotard a couple of months ahead of schedule, but business as a usual may well be a threat the stability of the republic going forward. We’re not there now, which makes this the perfect time to think about it. Why is secure VPN not secure enough? What’s the new, more secure protocol that we need?

Or is the problem that these guys just need to get their heads out of their own butts and decide that remote editing is something that they can conceptually live with. The only problems MIGHT be in their heads, but I’d need some of you folks to weigh in.

I’m especially interested in your thoughts on this, Mark. I know that Bunim/Murray isn’t Marvel, but you’re still working with material that’s worth a lot of dough to a lot of people, and you’re doing it all remotely. Can you comment on the IP security management issues that you’ve been talking about in-house without revealing any trade secrets?

[greg janza] “I use Resilio to keep two raids mirrored and it works extremely well.”

Greg, I noticed that Bob specifically mentioned Resilio as a solution that won’t work for a lot of people who don’t live in a good internet market. That’s pretty much the only kind I’ve ever lived in. LOL

Can you tell us a little more about where you are, what kinds of speeds you get, and the kinds of things that you’re doing with Resilio? I think we all have a lot more to learn about the difference between what’s on a company’s website, and how it’s working for customers in the world.

And Bob, if you have examples of folks who’ve tried Resilio and found it wanting in their specific applications, I’d sure love to hear about that too. Details, people! We need details! ????

[Greg Janza]

[Tim Wilson] “Can you tell us a little more about where you are, what kinds of speeds you get, and the kinds of things that you’re doing with Resilio? I think we all have a lot more to learn about the difference between what’s on a company’s website, and how it’s working for customers in the world.
“

I’m no expert on Resilio but I have used it quite a bit. In my home studio I have two 12 terabyte raids in a raid 0 configuration so the second raid is simply a mirror. I researched a fair number of utility programs that would keep both raids in perfect sync and I found that Resilio was the best solution for me. It’s also very reasonably priced. And for those who haven’t heard of it, Resilio is the legitimate business application of what was previously BitTorrent sync.

The best way to think about it is a continually running backup program that operates as a background process. For awhile I had two edit systems and so the two raids were being mirrored through a private ethernet network. I would guess I was getting around 100 MBPS transfer speed. I’ve added a laptop edit system which I sometimes use one of the raids with and so Resilio then works wifi only and I would estimate around 10MBPS transfer speed.

The key here isn’t speed obviously. It’s not impressively fast but it’s strength is in syncing with local hosts and more importantly remote hosts. Cloud applications like Frame.io have gotten the lion share of attention with all of the features that are offered and the simplicity of a web based client management platform. Resilio’s strength is that it has no data usage limitations. I would think the only limitation would be if your ISP has monthly data caps.

There’s also Resilio Connect which is their scalable remote data access app. This is enterprise level and I haven’t tried it out personally but it looks to be tailored for remote media work with a centralized media server.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net