Oh damn, didn't realise that!!!

And Bob, don't fall Victim to the "There's Nothing New" Brigade. There's nothing new to the binary system either. All you needed to have had was a very wide expanse of cave wall and a goodly supply of Flint chisels.

Don't fall victim...... seesh......

It's Sunday!

Grazie

.....

Okay, how would you implement it?

The first thing you have to get around is the huge file transfers that Bob pointed out. But let's say you've got a group of editors who want to work on the same project from scattered locations. What spiffy things could you do to make that happen?

Let's say that you connect with someone from across the globe, you've both got the source files already, and maybe your local edits just get mirrored on the remote system. If you render locally, the remote system also renders. Kind of a master/slave arrangement between two edit stations.

Or maybe your preview gets streamed to the remote user as a highly compressed h.264 render.

Think of it a little like an online game. Some of these are highly graphic intensive but the game system has to transmit enough information for each online user to see and respond to the same things. It happens all the time but the key is that there isn't all that much data being transmitted.

Rob Mack

Now, Bob, how about giving support to my other 2 ideas. Ah, but those ARE feasible! Yeah I can see why you wouldn't.

Grazie

If you mean:

"No more glitches, bugs, development slippage, just pure edit and render and immediate Customer/News/Retail satisfaction"

To some extent, yes. Firstly clouded computing means shifting the running of the application somewhere else, typically on virtual machines. The upside to this is less things to maintain and backup. Also you can gain access to way more computational power than you could ever afford, typically by leasing it. Say you want to run some massive statistical analysis then using someone elses clouded computers could be a very good solution. So yes there are areas in IT and science where clouded computing makes a lot of sense. There's a number of research projects that you can help out by doing some number crunching on your own PC in it's downtime e.g. Folding At Home etc, etc. This too is what's now called clouded computing, heck even the Internet itself is a cloud.

However the application that's being run will still crash, still have bugs etc if there's a coding error. There's no "magic" inside the cloud. That's why typically virtual machines are used, even if yours crashes the whole cloud doesn't go down.



As to my first response, no ,there are many new things in the world of computers. Inference engines, neural nets and the latest thing, quantum computing. We're also starting to see photons replacing electrons as well. There's also a serious tendancy to recycle old ideas under new names and The Cloud is an absolute classic.

Actually the science of computational engines is very old, what we see as "new" is the realisation of technology that can implement it in an affordable / practical way. For what it's worth I once tried to read a text on theoretical computer science and I got lost at the first paragraph. Seeing as how it's Sunday I might mention there's a mathematical problem in theoretical computer science and the first person to derive a proof wins a prize of $1,000,000.


Bob.

Why would anyone want to allow online vulnerability to their personel cache?
JJK

The Cloud is an absolute classic


Got to agree - take one part client-server, one part clusterization, add virtual machine, and one part java or .net, and call it cloud.

The problem with video editing is that it's I/O bound - something the 'cloud' can't help with.

Think of it a little like an online game. Some of these are highly graphic intensive but the game system has to transmit enough information for each online user to see and respond to the same things. It happens all the time but the key is that there isn't all that much data being transmitted.

Games, in general, don't stream. The player either already has the data or it cache's it (which again, gives the player the data. :) ). What you're thinking of is like OnLive. It runs the game somewhere else & sends you an AV stream you interact with. The idea is a "bad" computer can run a brand new game.

The downside is bandwidth: even though you're not running the game it still won't look as good as if you were running it. IE I can run any game in 1440x900 @ 60fps. Can't do that with streaming AV, so I'm reducing the data transferred

BUT!!!! Nothing stopping people from using Windows 7, have Vegas compiled to support multiple mice/KB support (which 7 supports) & everybody logging on to a really beefed up machine with big bandwidth running Vegas & having users connect via remote desktop.

I've been thinking about this since 2002.

It would take very little bandwidth actually. An operator sits in front of a keyboard shuttling the video, and the server is dishing up the results. When the operator hits the space bar, a high-rez still image replaces the low-rez file that was sent over the cloud.

The footage would be digitized in a centralized location, or digitized before the editor arrives. This is exactly what happens with Avid ISIS systems.

I spent a lot of my client's money travelling from edit suite to suite for events and I figured it all out.

I think it's a time whose idea has come. It's being used for games with some success. Video editing and rendering could totally use a cloud rendering solution.

I think the desire here is to have a way to edit that is easy, easy, easy, and never ever ever gives you trouble. This is the "what" of the question.

Having a cloud-based system presumably lays all the responsibility for stability and usability on someone else. Somehow, magically, everything just works in this system.

You can probably tell from my tone that I don't think a cloud-based edit system would meet these goals. They're good goals but cloud-based editing doesn't help you achieve them, even if you could ignore the bandwidth issue. Does it really matter if the application crashes remotely instead of locally?

There are good reasons to be able to work remotely. Maybe you have an editor working in another time zone and you all want to teleconference and look at the person's work. It's possible. You could share project files and render at both ends if you both have the assets. You could keep each remote preview in sync by transmitting timecode and edit changes. But this is the opposite of a cloud-based system. In this scenario everyone has the assets and the software, in a cloud system all of that is sitting on a server.

Rob Mack

Rick,

Yes, I'd thought along the same lines. This would work in a closed system with lots of bandwidth, like a single facility with multiple suites and a very high speed network. If you're working over the internet you need lots of bandwidth and the remote edit system needs to tailor the stream to what it can deliver. Things might look a lot like what they did in the early days of Avid and Media100. Low datarate video.

Given how much people want perfect playback, I can't see variable quality playback from a remote server being marketable. However, if you really need something like that I guess you can pay for the bandwidth, servers, and specialized edit systems.

I just think that putting the media out in the "cloud" is probably the wrong approach. Lift with your brain, not with your back.

Rob

The only thing games use "the cloud" for is saving data. Normally this results you being required to be online to play no matter what, requires mandatory update, etc. It's not really that nice. Look @ google's e-mail problem: now imagine if that was a new film coming out in two months: EVERYTHING gone, no way to get it back, period.

It always comes down to bandwidth and/or computer horsepower. You can save bandwidth by compression & uncompressing at arrival but then you need a better computer to decompress for you. You can eliminate the compression all together but then you need more bandwidth. I'm not talking about 10mbs connections either. Imagine youtube HD video, but you're streaming several of those at once. It's also a two way street: any inputs you're sending take up bandwidth too. If you wanted to add that "real time" audio overdub, it may not be possible.

I'm not saying it's not possible, I'm just say that, at this point, we'd be dealing with simple low res project and let's face it: if it's not HD with all the whiz-bangs done by the same software that made a feature film, nobody of the general public really cares.

Bandwidth is definitely the weak spot of the cloud. We have several cloud-based DB servers that we ramp up for various redundancy and testing purposes. When we were starting the initial loads we were finding that some of the data sets were going to take weeks to upload. After some conversations with the techs at the cloud company it was decided that it would be much faster, more efficient, and in fact cheaper to dump the couple-hundred GB to a hard drive and mail it to them across the country than to try to transfer it through the 'net.

I do a sort of reverse-cloud thing from time to time. If i'm out away from home and have some spare time to kill i can use my laptop to VNC back to the edit station at home and hack out some simple edits on whatever the current project is. It's slow and clunky, but it's nice to know that when i do get back home i've already done some of the ugly edits and gotten them out of the way.

Hmmmm, i wonder what the cats think when little bits of audio continually start and stop playing in the computer room while they're trying to nap.

Note that in the 70's networking was not commonplace and in explaining it to non-tech management we referred to what IBM called "The Ether" as "The Cloud".

Unlikely to happen as bus speed and throughput on the machine expand exponentially beyond what your local internet provider gives you. I don't want to leave eSata for even GB ethernet, do you?

And now Apple has formalized Lightspeed so as soon as the new machines come out to support that on Windows, we have even faster ways of getting off the drive and into memory.

And then there's the horrible tech support of the cloud. Don't even get me started. I would rather use these forums and continue to be a hacker on my own system than get no support from the likes of Apple, MS and Google. Ever need tech support for your 'free' Gmail account? Ha!

So good luck...I won't be following you there anytime soon.

Those of you who think that cloud based editing is nearly impossible or not practical for professional video need to stop and think a little.

A lot of Internet connections now are 10 to 25 Mbps. In some cities they are 1000 Mbps and there is a small percentage that are already 1 Gbps. And yes, that doesn't mean that whatever you are connecting to will have that same speed connection, but it is one bottleneck that is gone.

In 10 years I'd say the average Internet connection will be 100 Mbps or more.

In 10 years we'll be have super duper HD video, but figure too the compression schemes and codecs and whatever else will be better too, even optimized for the cloud.

10 years from now you won't be burning CD/DVD/BD, it will all be online, so the video quality will be made for that as well.

In 10 years will we be using Vegas to edit in the cloud? Only if Sony makes it happen, but if it's not them it will be their competition, or maybe someone new we haven't even heard of yet.

Yes, video will be the last thing to be in the cloud, but yes, it will be there.

I read what you said & remember what I said above: 10 years ago they said the same thing. Colleges & cities had T1 lines & within 10 years everybody (from the corp office in NYC to the person in the middle of nowhere, USA) would make T1 look like 1994 dialup. Never happened. My C drive, which is connected via IDE on the same ribbon as one of my DVD burners, transfers ~400megabits/second. FIOS advertises 20megabits/second. That means my C drive, in a BAD video editing setup, is 20x faster. My D SATA is even faster then that. With editing on the cloud you'd still have to write AND read from the drive at the same time.

Again, I'm not saying it won't happen, it's going to be a long time because it becomes feasible. Even with 1gigabit/second you'd need faster computer IO just to do all the necessary read/writes.

All that, and 10 years from now we'll probably be editing holographic 16K line files at 5GB/second with our petabyte local storage, and the wildest dreams of network bandwidth will still fall short of current needs.

Yep, there's a reason why, even with my home and my office VPN'd to be on the same local network, i still transfer a few dozen GBs to my laptop hard drive before making the commute in or back home.

"With editing on the cloud you'd still have to write AND read from the drive at the same time."I haven't studied cloud computing in depth, but isn't there a scenario where you would upload your clips, do all the editing and i/o in the cloud while only transferring the bits necessary to display your editing window, then once you're done, download your render or maybe leave it in in the cloud for web delivery.

...Jerry

PS: kinda like editing on an X Window Client - hasn't this already been done - but to a Unix server rather than "the cloud"?

Everything displayed still must be written somewhere. Back with dumb terminals it didn't write to HD's but that tech was dropped years ago. All the OS's now a days write cache either to RAM or drive. It could go to the RAM but then your OS still access the drive & OS's are very bulky. ROM based OS's went away years ago even though they could solve the caching issue now by forcing everything to go in to ram (RAM drives for consumers pretty much went away too).

The computer consumer got so caught up in the whole faster = better thing they happily traded off future capabilities for win-tel architecture setups.

Jerry, that's fine for a lot of applications but the bandwidth is still an issue. I don't really care if, while i'm word processing, it takes a few seconds for the screen to redraw when i change pages. However, with video editing, if the screen doesn't update close to real time it's very very difficult and time consuming to accomplish anything. Those few "bits necessary to display the editing window" will add up to requiring lots of megabytes in very short periods of time.

When i'm trying to access my home edit station through VNC on the laptop, i'm lucky if i can find an edit point, position the cursor, and perform the cut/drag/trim/etc in less than a minute. Almost every operation requires a lot of screen update and that takes a long time when it's not local.

"Jerry, that's fine for a lot of applications but the bandwidth is still an issue"Absolutely correct! My comments weren't meant to imply that there wasn't a bandwidth issue with a cloud based video editing app. After all, merely uploading mulitple GBs of clips could be prohibitive. My comment was merely meant to suggest that the problem may not be quite as bad as if one had to do i/o to a local hard drive.

"However, with video editing, if the screen doesn't update close to real time it's very very difficult and time consuming to accomplish anything."

I can remote desktop to my upstairs desktop via 802.11g wireless and edit in Vegas. It's not pretty, but I'd make a guess if I had 5x the bandwidth, it wouldn't be bad - maybe someday.

In the meantime, I'm sure it will be several years before I do any video editing on anyplace but my local PC.

...Jerry

Sure, in 1984 people thought we'd have flying cars by now, but we don't.

I still say in less than 10 years we'll have the ability to edit very well from the cloud.

Hear me out.

Imagine within 10 years (or less I think really), you'll be able to transfer your gigabytes of video files to the cloud in lets say 30 minutes or so.

After they are up there, you then have the equivalent or better of YouTube HD video on a timeline with all the features and more than you have now with Vegas, and it plays PERFECTLY on the timeline.

When you're done editing, you render out to high quality, and chances are you won't even need to "burn" it to a disk or even copy it back to your C: drive, you'll just post it on whatever the next Vimeo site is or wherever you want to view it, or stream it to your TV or whatever.

Better yet, your HD cams will have built in WiFi and after you record the video files automatically get sucked out of the cam to the cloud so that by the time you get home it will be ready for you to edit.

Seriously guys, this is gonna happen sooner than you think.