Cloud Storage Cost

fr0sty wrote on 7/31/2024, 11:13 PM

Google Drive charges me $10/mo, $120 per year for 2TB.

That comes out to $1 per 16.66GB.

VEGAS Cloud storage wants $15/year for 50GB.

That comes out to $1 per 3.33GB.

That's more than 5x more than I'm paying Google per GB.

We need solutions that enable us to host projects that are 10TB or more. I have some music festival shoots that approach filling up 2 8TB drives.

Google allows up to 10TB for $50/mo, $600/year, still at the $1 per 16.66GB price.

For me to put one of my 16TB festival projects on the cloud, I'd need 2 accounts (10TB per account max), and I'd have to pay $1200/yr to get 20TB of storage space.

For me to do the same through VEGAS using the $15 per 50GB of storage, I'd have to pay $6000 per year!

That makes this feature unusable for me, and it's something I'd love to have. Please consider offering up discounted options for mass storage of large projects. There are multiple editors on my team, and to be able to throw all the footage into the cloud and assign different shows to different editors, and then me be able to go behind them all and color them before rendering (extra big bonus points if we can eventually render directly from the cloud server, and have it e-mail a download link directly to our client!), that would speed up our workflow so much.

Comments

mark-y wrote on 8/1/2024, 7:50 AM

One thought: Do your team collaborators all need full access to the humongous source files? My needs, of course, are much more modest in retirement than yours, and I find that just the project with proxies, or in some instances compressed lossless digital intermediates, do the job quite nicely, and also keep my co-conspirators happy.

Not wishing to equivocate my needs with yours, of course, I manage some pretty hefty online collaborations with a single Google One account, which is 20 bucks a year, knowing that the final touches and grading with the original source will be done by me alone.

fr0sty wrote on 8/1/2024, 1:37 PM

A collaboration system that used proxies would work in some cases, but in others, not as much. For instance, Jam Cruise... 5 days aboard a boat, we film 30 shows on the main stage with 6-8 cameras. It's an absolutely massive data dump we have to do constantly throughout the event, and on the last night, we're filming until 2am, and they wake us up at 8am sharp and expect us to be off the boat no later than 9am, so there isn't always time for us to finish the last day's dump. In that case, proxies won't work, because there are terabytes of data that need to be sent to the project lead. In other cases, I'm not the project lead, but I am the one with the most color grading experience, and you don't really want to be working with proxies when grading. He has to have the source files to send to the client (they buy us 4 8TB drives, 2 for us to dump the project on, 2 for them to get backups of all the raw footage on). So, in that case, it would be useful for us all to have access to enough cloud storage space to dump the entire project, raw files and all, online.

john_dennis wrote on 8/1/2024, 1:50 PM

Ever the contrarian, but I'll say it anyway.

Have you or your associates considered hosting your own server?

fr0sty wrote on 8/1/2024, 2:24 PM

Of course, but that wouldn't come with the integration with Vegas that I'm hoping to see happen. Vegas needs a collaboration system built into it, where users can upload their video, other users can open Vegas and download it directly to their timeline, with the project and notes left behind by other editors already intact and placed on the timeline. There should be a system in place to generate proxies from the files that are stored on the server and enable the editors to download the proxies if that is all they need to do their job, and there should be a system in place to have the server render the final product and send it to the client.

I was hoping the cloud storage would be the first step towards that future, but at the current prices it is prohibitive. It isn't really useful for much in the video world when you're only dealing with gigabytes instead of terabytes. I shoot more than the maximum quota that they allow with Vegas Pro Suite on a single memory card in a single camera. During one of these festivals we will fill up 30 of these memory cards per camera, with 6-8 cameras.

fr0sty wrote on 8/1/2024, 2:31 PM

Resolve has multiple solutions to this problem. You can set your own server up, you can use Google drive or Dropbox, or you can use the Blackmagic cloud storage system. All of them work integrated directly within resolve.

Maybe Vegas should take the same route.

bitman wrote on 8/4/2024, 4:01 AM

@fr0sty how about Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage?

fr0sty wrote on 8/4/2024, 4:05 AM

There's plenty of external cloud storage solutions that would work, including setting up my own server, but the problem is, unlike Resolve, VEGAS doesn't offer any way to integrate these external cloud storage solutions directly into the app for easy collaborative editing, that's what I'm suggesting they change here. Either that, or offer affordable integrated solutions that use their cloud storage.