5 THINGS - Simplifying Film, TV, and Media Technology - Audio Only

Today we’re going to take a deep dive into the various ways to edit remotely with Adobe Premiere Pro, when you or your team, plus your computers and media just can’t be in the same place at the same time. Let’s get started.

1. Team Projects

Team Projects in Premiere Pro – as well as for After Effects – has been around for quite a while. And it’s free!

Team Projects is Adobe’s solution for creatives who each have their own local edit system– either at the office or at home – and a local copy of the media attached to that edit machine. Meaning, no one in your team is using any shared storage. Everyone accesses a Project that Adobe hosts in the cloud. And because Creative Cloud is managing the Team Projects database, versions and changes are tracked.

Overview of Adobe Team Projects

Of course, this workflow does require discipline, including organizing media carefully and utilizing standardized naming conventions.

But once you’re in the groove, Team Projects is very easy to use.

Let’s take a quick look, so you can see how the flow goes.

You can start the process when you have Premiere Pro Open. Give the project a name, and then add Team members as collaborators with their email addresses. They’ll get a desktop notification through Creative Cloud that they’ve been added to the Team project.

Be sure to check your scratch disks on the 3^rd tab correctly – as every team project editor will be saving their files to their own local storage.

Let’s fast-forward till we have an edit we want to share.

In your Team Project pane, you’ll see a cute little arrow at the bottom right of the pane, that tells you to share your changes in the team project.

Don’t worry if you forget, if you look sequence name tab, and see an arrow, that’s a reminder to share and upload your changes.

Click the “Share My Changes” button, and you’ll see all the stuff you’ll be sharing with your team members. Add a comment if you wanna summarize what you did. Click “Share”. Premiere Pro will then upload your changes to your Team’s Creative Cloud account.

Your Team members will then open the Team Projects they’ve been invited to through the Creative Cloud Desktop app.

Don’t worry – if any media files are marked offline in Premiere, team members can either relink to that media if they have it locally, or you can download them from within Premiere Pro via the Media Management option in Premiere.

As you can see, this is where the aforementioned Scratch disks, media management, and organization really come into play – or else you’ll be relinking all day.

Now, this is just the project, sequences, and media. What about Review and Approve with your Team? With the Adobe acquisition of Frame.io last year, Team Projects now adds review and approval capability inside Teams Projects.

Despite the fact Team Projects has been around for a while, it’s still an excellent solution that is already part of your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, so there is no extra cost to test it out.

2. Adobe Productions

Adobe Productions is the evolution of the “Shared Projects” feature Adobe rolled out in 2017 and it differs significantly from Adobe’s Team Projects.

While the workflow with Team Projects expects each user to have their own local workstation and local copies of the media, Productions operates assuming that everyone on your team is already connected to the same shared storage. This would be akin to having all your creatives in the same building, and all of them mounting the same NAS or SAN volumes to their machine. Because everyone can access the same media at the same time, there is no need to copy media back and forth from your local drive to the shared drive. It saves a ton of time.

Overview of Adobe Productions

The trick to make this work is to have a software “traffic cop” working in the background and watching over every user opening what Adobe calls a “Production”.

A Production is essentially a sup’d up Premiere Pro project file that points to several smaller project files. The smaller project files are what each editor works with, and all changes are saved to the smaller projects within the primary Production.

The ...

All of you are asking the same thing. “How can I edit remotely or work from home?” Today we’ll look at Avid, as they have many supported options, so you can cut with Media Composer from just about anywhere. Let’s get started.

1. Extending Your Desktop

The first method we’ll look at is simply extending your desktop, that is – having your processing computer at the office, while you work from home and remote into that machine. This has been the crutch that most facilities have relied on in the past few weeks. Let’s examine how this works.

First, this scenario assumes that you edit at a facility, where all of the networked computers and shared storage are...and that you can’t take any of those things home. This can be due to security, or other concerns like needing access to hundreds of TB of data.

In this case, the creatives are sent home, and I.T. installs a remote desktop hardware or software solution on each of the machines. The creatives then connect through a VPN or virtual private network – to gain secure access from their home editing fortresses of solitude back into the facility and attempt to work as normal.

Now topically this sounds like a real win-win, right? You get access to your usual machine and usual shared storage. Sure, you lose things like a confidence monitor (if you had one), but you should be fine, right?

The devil, as always, is in the details.

Typical screen sharing software solutions that are installed on your office editing machine are often dumpster fires for creatives. I’m not saying they are bad for general I.T. use, or when you need to remote in and re-export something, but by and large most screen sharing protocols do not give a great user experience. Full frame rate, A/V sync, color fidelity, and responsiveness usually suffer. Solutions like Teamviewer, Apple or Microsoft Remote Desktop, VNC, or most any of the other web-based solutions fail. Hard. You’ll pull all of your hair out before you finish an edit.

Moving up to more robust solutions like HP’s RGS – Remote Graphics Software – or a top of the line solution like Teradici’s PCoIP software – is about as good as you’re gonna get. The license cost may cost a few hundred dollars, too...depending on your configuration.

But here’s the kicker. They’re Windows only as a host.

While you can access the computer running the Teradici software with a macOS or Windows equipped computer – or even via a hardware zero client – the environment you create in will always be a Windows OS.

Quite unfortunately, there does not exist a post-production-creative friendly screen sharing solution for macOS.

The only solution I’ve come across over these many years is a company called Amulet Hotkey – yes, that’s their name – who take the Teradici PCoIP Tera2 card and put it into a custom external enclosure and add some secret sauce.

You then feed the output of your graphics card, plus your keyboard, mouse, and audio into the device and the PCoIP technology takes over. It’s quite frankly the best of both worlds: PCoIP and macOS.

This ain’t gonna be cheap.

Expect a few thousand dollars per hardware device, and availability at the moment may be difficult. You also going to need to do some network configuration for Quality of Service, and then decide ho...

On this episode of 5 THINGS, I’ve got a few tricks that you may not know about that will help you upload, manage, and make YouTube do your bidding.

1. Upload Tricks

You probably have media on YouTube, and you probably think that after thousands of hours, you’ve mastered the ‘Tube. But there are some little-known upload tricks and workarounds, playback shortcuts, and voodoo that you may not even know that YouTube does.

Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say you’ve got a masterpiece of a video, maybe it’s an uncle getting softballed in the crotch, maybe it’s your buddy taking a header down a flight of stairs, or maybe, just maybe it’s the cutest pet in the world. MINE.

Lucy: the cutest, bestest pet in the world.

...and the world needs to see it, right? And you export a totally-worth-the-hard-drive-space-huge-monster-master-file so you don’t lose 1 bit of quality.

And that’s OK.

Now, in actuality, it’s not the most efficient, but let’s save that existential technology discussion for another episode.

Did you know that YouTube will actually take this massive file? That you don’t need to shrink it, recompress it, or otherwise use the presets in your transcoder du jour? YouTube used to publish a page that specified video file sizes and data rates for “enterprise” grade connections. Ostensibly, this was so companies with fat internet connections could upload massive files. After all, YouTube re-compresses all files anyway. Yes, as I’ve said many times before, YouTube will ALWAYS recompress your media. ALWAYS.

“Enterprise” video bitrates for YouTube. These are 5-6x LARGER than what YouTube recommends for typical users.

But, this page was taken down.

Why?

Because accepting larger files sizes ties up YouTube’s servers, and takes longer for their transcoding computers to chomp through and subsequently create the versions you’ll end up watching. Plus, it’s a crappy experience for you, the end user, to wait hours for an upload AND the processing. Despite this, you can still do it. In the above video, you can see I have an HD ProRes file, and it’s several GB. As I select the file and start the upload, YouTube tells me this will take several hours. That sucks. However, uploading a less compressed file means the versions that YouTube creates will be based on higher quality than the compressed version you’d normally export and upload from your video editor or one that you’d create from your media encoder.

YouTube creates all of your media variants...so you don’t have to.

So what would you rather have...a copy of a copy of your finished piece? Or just 1 copy? The less compression you use, the better looking the final video will be.

More on this here: A YouTube user uploads, downloads and re-uploads the same video to YouTube 1000 times and the compression is staggering. This is called “generational loss”.

By the way, you know that YouTube creates all of your various versions, right? From the file you upload, YouTube creates the 240, 360, 480, 720, 1080 and higher versions. Are yours not showing up? Have patience. YouTube takes a little bit.

OK, back to the high res fat files. I know, the fact there is a long upload for these large files sucks, but it does lead me to the next tip. Did you know you can resume a broken upload? As long as you have the same file name, you can resume an upload for 24 hours after a failed upload. In the video above, let me show you. Here’s the file I was uploading before. As you can see, it still has quite a way to go. Oops, closed my tab. Now, I’m gonna wait a little bit.

OK, it’s been several hours, and I’m going to open a new tab and navigate back to the upload page. Now, I’ll reselect the same file. The upload picks up ...

Have you ever thought about using a Hackintosh? Wondering how they perform? Or maybe you wanna build one? Fear not my tech friends, for in this episode, we’ve got you covered.

1. Why Build a Hackintosh?

If you spend any amount of time following Apple, you’ve realized that they are a consumer technology juggernaut. Phones, tablets, watches, headphones. This has led some to speculate that Apple isn’t paying attention to the professional market.

That is, Apple isn’t making computers for those who need a lot of horsepower for creative applications, and expandability to make the system more powerful than what the factory model ships with...or what Apple deems us as worthy of.

We also need to look at the cost. The Apple logo carries a price premium, and without much exception, Apple computers are more expensive than their Windows or Linux counterparts. And while I concede that a ready-to-roll machine should cost more than the sum of its parts, Apple tends to inflate this more than most.

Another reason to build a Hackintosh....is, well, because it’s there. Because you can. Well, physically, anyway. I’m not a lawyer, and debating the legalities of building a Hackintosh is not my idea of an afternoon well spent. However, the tech challenge in and of itself is enough for some to dig in.

Lastly, owning a Hackintosh means you’ll at some point you’re gonna need troubleshoot the build due to a software update breaking things. If you don’t build it yourself, you’re not gonna know where the bodies are buried, and you’ll be relying on someone else to fix it.

For all of these reasons, I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed some thermal paste, and went down the road of building my very own Hackintosh.

2. Choosing the Right Parts

“Look before you leap.”

When building my Hackintosh, this was my cardinal rule. See what others had done before, what hardware and software junkies had deemed as humanly possible, and follow build guides. Although I was willing to build it, I didn’t want it to be a constant source of annoyance due to glitches, and then no avenue to search for answers if things went south. Part of building a Hackintosh is being prepared for things to break with software updates – and to only update after others had found the bugs. I wanted to keep the tinkering after the build to a minimum.

More createy, less fixey.

The main site online for a build like this is tonyxmac86.com. The site has tons of example builds, a large community on their forums, and even better, users who have done this a lot longer than me.

A great starting point is the “Buyer’s Guide” which has parts and pieces that lend themselves to the power than many Apple machines have. A CustoMac Mini, for example, is closely related to the horsepower and form factor you’d find with a Mac Mini.

As I tend to ride computers out for awhile, I decided to build a machine with some longevity.

Longevity meant building a more powerful machine, and thus as close as possible to a Mac Pro. And wouldn’t you know it, there is a section called “CustoMac Pro”.

The downside to a machine as powerful and expandable as a CustoMac Pro is that it’s fairly large. After I took inventory of all of the expansion cards I’d want to use, I realized I didn’t need everything that a CustoMac Pro afforded me. The large motherboard in the system – known as an ATX board, was simply overkill and was too large of a footprint for my work area. I could actually go with something a little bit smaller and still have plenty of horsepower.

So, I looked into the CustoMac mATX builds. M stands for Micro, and the mATX board would be similar to a full sized ATX board, but a bit smaller. I’d also lose some expandability with a smaller, micro ATX motherboard, but I could use the same processor that I would use in a full size build – in this case, a Core i7-8700...

In this episode, we’re going to dive deep into live streaming. Sure your phone can do it, but if you want a professional live stream to YouTube or Facebook or just about anywhere else, then this episode is for you.

My friends at LiveU asked me to do a deep dive on their Solo streaming device. I suggested, “why not a shootout between the LiveU Solo and the Teradek VidiU Pro?” – (which is another similar device).

So, is that cool with you, LiveU?

1. What do they do?

Both units have a ton of similarities; so let’s get those out of the way first so we can focus on the ooey gooey differences.

At the core of both units is the ability to take an SD or HD video source, usually, HDMI, encode the signal, and stream it out to the web to sites like YouTube or Facebook. This can be via a traditional Ethernet Internet connection, going mobile with Wi-Fi, or even streaming via a USB cellular 3G/4G connection.

Both The LiveU Solo and VidiU Pro have the ability to bond across a number of onboard connections, which gives you the ability to have an added level of not only redundancy but also throughput, to ensure your signal is getting out smoothly and at the highest bandwidth possible. Both units, however, charge extra for this feature, which I’ll get into that later.

Both units can take AC power, run on an internal battery, are small in size, and both weigh under a pound (although the VidiU Pro is less than half of that) and they easily mount on your camera or attach to your Batman utility belt.

The units also have built-in batteries so you can stream for several hours before having to re-charge. Both models also have a webpage backends to control the units.... to varying degrees.

Web Interfaces for the LiveU Solo (left) and Teradek VidiU Pro (right)

The Solo and VidiU Pro both do their jobs very well. But the devil is certainly in the details, and that’s what we’re going to tackle next.

2. Setup and Connectivity

The LiveU and Teradek units both allow setup via a web browser on your computer or mobile device. LiveU, via the LiveU Portal and Teradek via the webserver on the unit.

LiveU is pretty straightforward. Create an account at http://solo.liveu.tv/, boot up your LiveU Solo unit (although this may take a while), and connect your Solo to the internet. Then, enter in your Solo serial number into the portal, and you’re off and running. You now can do your entire streaming configuration of the Solo signal on the webpage for your unit. Now, this is a blessing and a curse...which I’ll get into a bit later on.

Teradek’s setup is very similar. Boot up the unit (which doesn’t take as long as LiveU), and get your unit on your local network – it doesn’t even have to access the internet at this point. It just needs an IP address so your local computers or Wi-Fi enabled cellular devices can see it. Unlike the Solo, the VidiU Pro has a web server built-in, which makes configuration a bit easier.

Why is that Michael?

Having a local webserver built-in means I don’t need to have Internet connectivity on my laptop or workstation if I’m out in the field and want to configure the unit. Yes, I know, you can use cellular devices like your phone to configure their unit, but if cellular service on location is lacking for your phone’s carrier, now what? It’s a slight issue, but I think having a web server built into the unit as Teradek does makes for an easier way of local configuration.

Speaking of cellular connections, at this point, if you’re planning on going into the great wide open and streaming via 4G connections, make sure you’ve purchased your cellular modems and chosen the right data plan – one that won’t throttle your bandwidth or cut you off at the knees during an event.

Now it’s time for the speeds and feeds and goes in and goes out part of our ...