Remote Post That Works: Reliable Workflows for Creative Teams

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome to Broadcast to Post. Today we're taking a fresh look at the state of remote post production tools for creative teams. Not long ago, remote workflows were the number one concern for nearly every post house. Big questions were everywhere. How do we get editors working from home? How do we stay secure? How do we hit our deadlines and keep our budgets in check? And usually we bring in a guest, an expert or a client to help us unpack these kinds of topics. But during our prep call for this episode, Michael Kamas and I had a bit of a realization between the two of us. Longtime post production integrators and resellers at Keycode Media, with backgrounds in post facilities, and Michael's experience at a few remote post vendors, we've not only had a front row seat to the remote revolution, we've helped shape it. So in this episode, we're breaking it all down. What's working, what's not, the hidden costs teams often overlook and how to choose the right remote tools for your creative workflow. Quick warning. I did notice sometimes we jumped into products without first telling you what that product does. Instead of trying to keep up with the real time Googling, feel free to contact us via the keycodemedia.com website and we can set up a call to review all these tools we're talking about and, and what's going to fit for your creative team. All right, let's jump in. Okay. What does remote post actually Mean today in 2025? How do we get here? We're not talking about one thing anymore. There are remote and hybrid pieces at different parts of the workflow. For example, remote desktop, there's HP anywhere, there's parsec, there's jump cloud object to remote or to remote facility with things like LucidLink suite, studios, and then just flat out cloud storage, AWS, Backblaze, Wasabi Feeding to and from people's homes, collaborative tools both live and on demand. The review and approval tools, Looper, Evercast and collaboration tools of all sorts. And the full cloud workflows, where people have systems next to the storage in the cloud. And we'll try to stay conceptual here at the very beginning, despite all the things I just said, we'll get into those specific products later. What's the difference between remote desktop editing, hybrid cloud and full cloud based editing? What have you seen out there since, you know, we got into this in 2020? I remember doing remote control attempts from Palm Desert at the HPA show back to Burbank to see if we could do this to make it work for clients. What have you seen since those early days when it was really, really wild, wild West? [00:02:48] Speaker B: It's a little bit less of the wild, wild west now. There's a few sheriffs in town, but we've kind of have three different main methodologies of doing it right. We've had the take your hard drives home and work in your island at home and then bring it back. We also have the, well, why don't I remote into the office using some various technologies, remote into the office from my house and access the data either sitting there or I've downloaded onto my local system, or we're going to go all in on cloud and we're going to remote into workstations and storage in the cloud, use the compute, use the storage, and use that as your centralized WAN in the cloud. And we find that folks have actually tried multiple solutions to see where they worked financially and from a creative level. Do creatives work with these technologies in a way that makes them be more efficient and it doesn't slow them down? [00:03:40] Speaker A: No, I would say one of the things I've seen, I walked into rental houses in Los Angeles and where there used to be storage for maybe 12, 14 edit systems that would go out to someone's home or to say Lantana on the west side, now there's space and there's 900 to 1200 systems all lined up with their storage, their switches, everything set up as remote. That's one of the pieces I've seen roll out and that's toward episodic and probably a lot of theatrical, creative as well. What other things have you seen in terms of remote control that have worked out well? Most of those tend to be based in jump. [00:04:22] Speaker B: Well, I think what we found is a lot of the folks, and I would count myself in this scenario, is that I'm a stickler for the tech. I'm a stickler for that's a frame off that there's a little bit of latency or lag when I hit the space bar. What we found is that while that's still there, it's, it's much more preferable to have that hundredth second of a lag if it means I don't have to sit in two hours of traffic, if it means that I can stay home and watch over my kids who are at home learning. So there's been a kind of a give and take. And I like seeing how quickly things have been kind of come down to the lowest common denominator because it makes that work life balance. So Much easier. [00:05:02] Speaker A: So the thing there also is there's a difference between creative editorial or proxy offline editorial and finishing. So finishing requires those anti laggy workflows with the high end monitors in possibly 5.1. Have you seen anyone who's actually been doing full high end workflows as a remote? [00:05:27] Speaker B: That's a great question. And it almost gets into the well, are you professional or are you not? Because that's such a loaded term. We have a lot of colorists who say I can do an HD or 4K 422 remote grading to someone and someone can then watch it on their monitor at their house. And a lot of customers are okay with that. There are others that say no, I need to see it mixed on a dubstage. I need to see it on that $50,000 Sony display. So it really comes down to how much is the client willing to invest in saying I need this level of quality or, or can I trust my colorist that when they say this is the good look for this, you know what, I trust the colorist. It looks okay here. There may be a little bit of banding, but I know that's because of the technical limitations, not creative ones. [00:06:15] Speaker A: Well, and the other thing I remember hearing is folks setting up iPad pros because you could color calibrate them. They'd get them all in the same room as the monitor, calibrate them as close and then those would be sent out and then they're using like a, you know, Streambox 444 workflow to actually get that same signal to them so they could talk. That's part of the piece that I've seen and the one thing that we kind of haven't talked about which is always, you know, the end of the process. Audio. I don't think I've seen anyone doing a remote audio workflow. You know, even in the early 20s it was something that someone, it was always a push, push the drive to someone's home and do that. My brother in law actually was a mixer and he was full swap drives before the 20s started. And have you seen anyone who's actually been trying to mix off the cloud yet? [00:07:15] Speaker B: It's normally been for review and approve. You can't really edit audio at the sample level in the cloud because the latency between making that change at the sample level and then hearing it is completely out of sync. So we've had folks do the I'm going to mix on my Pro Tools rig and then I'm going to use some kind of transfer mechanism to play it in real time to someone remote. But as you know, everyone has different speaker setups. Some people are looking at it on their phone. So I haven't yet heard of someone saying, yeah, we did this fantastic mix and we could hear it in pristine atmos quality. On the other side of the world, no, it's been. If there's any way possible, the client needs to be in that mix environment to hear it in the right way and make changes creatively with the mixer in real time. Doing it asynchronously just doesn't work. [00:08:04] Speaker A: Yep. And there was the mention of security. So I feel that security kind of got a little easier and then began to kind of ramp back up again as for a moment there, we realized you can't secure an industry that can't make any money. What have you heard from folks out there in terms of they're dealing with, you know, good old fashioned security issues? [00:08:30] Speaker B: Well, I think it may be, you know, we've talked about the jobs in LA and it being a pendulum, right. The work being based on a pendulum and it's going to get stronger and worse. And I think security was. The pendulum was swinging the other way before that, which means there was an overreach of security. A lot of client contracts said, you can't use our stuff in the cloud. You can't put anything you're working on of ours in the cloud, let alone remote. And we saw it saying, well, because of that, we don't get sued. You can't take that home. And then we had post facilities like Buah Murray, right, in the early 2000 and twenties that said, here's your computer in storage, go home, don't share it with anyone. Like, we trust you. And we've started to see a more relaxation of those standards to say you're employed. We've signed this media out to you, we've signed this drive out to you. If it leaks, we know where it came from. And some folks even put watermarks on content so they know exactly who had it. So you can either look at it is the early 2000s forced us to relax security, or it was just time for the pendulum to swing the other way, which then enables some of these remote workflows. [00:09:35] Speaker A: So pinky swear all the way up to we're going to take your firstborn. It gets out. Where are you seeing most teams today on that spectrum between local and full cloud? I've got my thoughts on it. Let me hear yours first. [00:09:53] Speaker B: Well, part of me is kind of bummed that there's not more 100% in the cloud. But a lot of that comes down to the financial aspect of it, right? Doing everything in the cloud full time for each editor + storage + compute is multiple hundreds of dollars a month. And that sometimes just doesn't shake out financially. We also don't see a lot of facilities that have enough infrastructure to say all 10 of you creatives can remote into our antiquated infrastructure at our one giggy network and do work on the machines that are still at the facility. Because after all these years, now maybe it's time to downsize and go to a smaller facility. So moreover, I'm seeing hybrid workflows where folks may remote in if need be. But instead it's let's put our content or at least proxies on cloud storage that we can either localize at each creative's house or let's put it on some of this new breed of cloud storage. Right? The suite studios and the lucid links where you can mount the storage on your local machine and edit remotely. And then regardless of whether you edit from the cloud directly or just download locally, you have a viable path moving forward to edit. [00:11:02] Speaker A: Makes sense. I mean, and I mentioned the rental houses and their layout that was all pure remote. It's on prem somewhere. You can cut off whoever is not allowed at an instant and everything is still delivering there. I think that's one of the things that happened in la and let's get to some examples that work. A couple weeks ago I was out in the tri state area and saw a corporate setup in New Jersey where they're doing marketing and training and all that other fun sort of stuff. And you know, as you're walking through, looking at different places, you know, you see that system, full edit system, but it's doing things all on its own. It's magical or remote. You know, what deployments have you seen out there that work well in outside of the LA and New York methodology that we always tend to think of. [00:11:56] Speaker B: There'S a lot of different examples. There's a large automobile, shall we say manufacturer in the Midwest that has gone bare bones where they're just shipping drives out to people and they edit and then ship their content back. And this is a major, major company. Then the flip side, outside film and television, we have things like Mr. Beast. Right? Mr. Beast not only has a massive footprint in Greensville, but they also have Remote Ed who are using Adobe Productions. So it's been really across the spectrum as to who's using what and what Works. I find more often than not, it comes down to will the creatives be okay in this workflow? And to their credit, there's been a lot more. There's been a lot of management in it that has kind of acquiesced to what the creatives are willing to do to make sure they get their work done and in time for the next project that comes in. [00:12:48] Speaker A: Makes sense. And we also, we know of a large, you know, appliance manufacturer that is working worldwide. By sending data all over the place, they get the whole thing tied together with iconic. And there's a little bit of, you know, cloud storage with LucidLink and then on prem stuff with edit sharing things, syncing all over the place and working like that. So, speaking of what's working, I mean, I think we beat that one to death. [00:13:14] Speaker B: We certainly have. Obviously, we've talked about what's worked, but obviously there's a lot of things that don't work. And, you know, these may work for some folks and but don't work for others. But across the board, there have been technologies that have had a lot of promise but haven't really paid off. So, Jeff, not that I want to throw anyone under the bus, but what technologies have you seen that, that or concepts that have been tried over the past few years for remote editing that just didn't pan out? [00:13:41] Speaker A: I think one of the things that was tried was for Avid workflows, shipping data and then via the cloud, trying to sync that up and down and then sync bins up and down as opposed to a direct connection back to the source of truth. I think that was something that was tried that was a little difficult. [00:14:03] Speaker B: Can you elaborate on that? Is that just a matter of keeping things in sync or is it the upload and download time? [00:14:10] Speaker A: Well, there were upload and download times. They were trying to use certain cloud vendors and got hit with costs that weren't expected. Sure amount of time necessary to sync. So if you are working in one bin, if you think you're working in a synchronous workflow, but you're really working in an async workflow, what do we used to call those concatenation errors on the bin? Like, I've got changes that you don't have, or we get bin collisions, I think that's one of the things that was out there that was a problem. VPN bandwidth became a huge deal. We had a lot of folks that came along and said, I oh, our VPN's perfectly fine. All of our accounting team works through it. Excel works great. And then you start, you know, adding on edit system after edit system after edit system and then the whole thing just blows apart. And then people began to figure out ways to have VPN less workflows, you know, protocols that would bypass that entire thing without having to have that level. And a lot of times, you know, there was pushback from the IT team until they finally realized that their choices were try to secure this side of it without the VPN or buy a whole new firewall at six figures and make that work. With the wonderful size VPN everyone would love to have, we can do anything you want, provided you're willing to pay for it. [00:15:29] Speaker B: I'd almost counter that with a majority of the issues I saw or I continually see is actually on the creative's end. And creatives, I love you, but you got to take some accountability here. I understand that you have a partner at home that is also doing a video call and you have kids who are doing distance education. But you have to make sure that if you have an Internet provider that has a decent plan, you pay a few bucks more than charge it back to the client or charge it back to your company. And that if you have a router that can take an ethernet cable, please plug your machine in. Don't use WI fi. Those two things alone, congestion on your network and running over WI fi is going to degrade your performance horribly. And lastly, for whatever holiday you celebrate at the end of the year, ask for a new router. Get a new modem router that has QoS or quality of service to make sure that whatever you're using to edit, whether it's connecting to a VPN or using parsec or jump, that you have that set correctly on your router to get the best performance possible. [00:16:34] Speaker A: Yes. And the thing is, it doesn't have to be the end of the year Black Friday sales. And I thought we were past people trying to use editorial tools on WI fi. No, no, it's still out there. [00:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And unfortunately, if you're sending an Excel doc, that's fine. We're trying to send a ProRes 422 file that's an hour long. You're going to have problems. [00:16:55] Speaker A: Correct. And if your teenager is in the back gaming, you may have some particular difficulties that pop up there. [00:17:04] Speaker B: You mentioned something else earlier, which I think a lot of people overlook, and that was trying to wrangling the file differences between what's been pushed up or shared to someone with what's on location or what's back to the facility and have you run to the same problem where there's just a lack of media management or data management? [00:17:22] Speaker A: Yes. So fully on prem. That's a much easier ask because you can also pick the phone and everybody's. They may not be working synchronously, but they're working asynchronously at the same time in the same place. [00:17:38] Speaker B: And they have that one source of truth and they got sand. [00:17:40] Speaker A: Yeah, they've got that. So the problem is when you start spreading that out and, oh, I've made changes to Act 4. Wait, I already made changes to Act 4. Okay, how is that going to get figured out? Or how are we going to keep these bins from colliding? Because that's one other thing. Oh, just open up Act. Open up Act 4's bin and work it. Well, it won't open. Of course it won't. It's the same bin. So that's part of the thing you've got to plan for to make sure, if you've got a plan for that as an engineer, to make sure the creatives don't hit that particular rock with their foot, because it's going to hurt once you get further down the line. [00:18:18] Speaker B: We used to. I mean, when we've done storage audits where we go in and we say, look, this one file is replicated five times. Why do you need five copies of that? I think over the past few years that's gotten even worse. People are even more afraid to delete content. So now we get the same export five or six times, different file names. You know, underscore, final underscore. I mean, it. So we're seeing more and more storage being used with multiple copies. And unless you have a media manager or at least an asset management system, it becomes a. That's. That project suddenly ballooned and that's how big it is. And let's move on to the next one. And it becomes a. It becomes an issue of spring cleaning, which it never becomes. [00:18:54] Speaker A: Spring. No, it's never spring. And as an organization that sells people storage, you would think we'd be more than happy to hear that. We're more than happy to sell you more storage. However, you can't just keep buying more storage. You've got to go in and manage the storage. You've got to eliminate these problems, otherwise your business is going to start to fall apart. It costs you too much to operate at that point. [00:19:20] Speaker B: Something else I find that's very interesting. Obviously, products like Frame IO have taken off, but there's also been what I like, which is Live Review and Approve. Right. What we call synchronous, where everyone could be looking at the same image at the same time and making comments about it. And over the past few years there have been a lot of solutions for it. But what I find is people don't want that for the most part. They want the asynchronous, they want to look at notes that someone else has left at their leisure. And I want to take those notes when I'm ready to edit. And that way you don't have to have the back and forth. [00:19:54] Speaker A: I think that really has to do with the genre of what you're doing. Okay, so we've got a couple clients that live in the animation space and they're all about full synchronous review and approval and discussion to the point where we got one client that's interested in setting up multiple cameras to watch them while they're doing the full review. And it's literally being switched on the fly or auto switched on the fly. So not only are they seeing their program output from the timeline, they're seeing the actual GUI output from the timeline. And all of this gets recorded on the back end. And then you've got what's being said in the room, what's being said remotely, everybody's all tied in. So those notes about what's going on here can then go back to animation very fast. You know, pull a transcript off of that, bam, you're ready to go. Which it speeds up the entire process. So we've seen large scale clients do this all over the place with multiple cameras, either switched or non switched. And folks are using things like Evercast or A lot of people tried the let's convert it into NDI and feed it into Zoom concept. And while that worked, it gets the point across, it doesn't get the point across at the right frame. Right. So that's something that people are trying to now beef up. We don't have to bring them into the office, but we've got to make sure that we're, you know, marching to the same drummer. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Zoom for review and Approve is like using TeamViewer to control an edit session. Just, it doesn't work. But something a little bit different than that is back to the Live Review and Approve. Is that not only for external stakeholders and clients, but internal? It's. I don't want to hear the inflection in their voice. I just want the notes so I can download the markers prove in my timeline. And as a creative, I don't want to get that, you know, maybe it's because I'm not as much of an introvert, but if I hear someone say, eh, yeah, that works, I know they're not completely sold on it. And I can then say, well, let's try something different. If I get a note, if I don't get a note because the person who's reviewing it just says, okay, I'm not going to have that creative connection between them to say, okay, maybe I should try something different. [00:22:08] Speaker A: Well, and this goes back to something that I've seen as a problem with remote editorial. Okay, how are you going to get the next job if all you are is just, you're an email address, you're, you're a slack person. You're, you're, you know, a teams person that just, oh, yes, I'll take care of that. No problem. There's no, there's no teamwork there. [00:22:29] Speaker B: There's no, there's no, there's no personality or skin in the game there. [00:22:32] Speaker A: Correct. And you're, you're not sitting at the, at the water cooler or at lunch talking about, you know, what's going on with this stuff. I think as people grow more insular, it makes reconstituting a team for the next project very difficult. And that, I think is just one of the drawbacks with Remote in that asynchronous, let's just address the notes at three in the morning concept. If you're all in the same, for lack of a better term, Zoom Room, you still have that interaction with folks and it's like, hey, Michael had some good points on that, you know, and we know that if we bring him into this, it'll be great. And then the next project comes along and guess what? You get a phone call. [00:23:14] Speaker B: My concern to piggyback on that and working with a lot of the editors here in la, where I'm based and going to different user groups, is that the folks that are coming to these user groups like LA Creative Pro, User Group and lappg, when they're in person, is that you are networking and making contacts. With the explosion of editors for social media who are advertising their services on LinkedIn or Fiverr or Upwork, how are you differentiating between them? At least with Fiverr, they know, you know, how much they're charging you, you know, what stuff they've worked on. But how are you as an editor that's been in the New York or LA space, or even a creator, you have to go out there and hustle and hustle and try and stand out from the other hundred thousand people or more who say they can edit as well. If you have experience in the Hollywood and film and TV space, you've got a leg up. And it's hard to show people you've got that leg up when you're just a faceless name that you're seeing on social media looking for work. [00:24:13] Speaker A: Correct. And I think that's something that people need to take into consideration when they're engaged with their creative teams. No matter how they're engaged. How am I going to be bringing my value, other than just as a simple storyteller to the party? [00:24:30] Speaker B: Something else we should probably address. And that's when you begin to do your remote editing work. There's always the concept of how much is this going to cost? Right. And then you start determining the roi. What does all this new gear cost? What does it cost to outfit someone who's editing remotely or in the cloud? So I thought maybe we should break down some of the hidden costs or costs that maybe didn't. You didn't consider when moving to a remote editing workflow. So, Jeff, what are some of the things that are overlooked first and foremost? And I think we know of a big one regarding cloud costs that you could probably share with us. [00:25:03] Speaker A: You know, Joe left the machine on again over the holiday weekend and you know, it was four days and it's a high, high dollar value cost, high GPU system that's out there and it's been humming the whole time. That cost us, you know, x amount of extra. Joe's too expensive. Next time. It doesn't matter how good of a creative he is, he's just actually accidentally raised his rate exponentially. So I think that's, that's one of the things there that that's a problem. And then one of the other pieces we end up with is erector set workflows. In the cloud, you can do everything. And it's been proven you can do anything. And AWS says this, yes, we can do that. Not a problem. We can do that. The thing is, should you do that? And that's one of the pieces there that's a problem because back in the teens, it used to be we could do that and then you'd start doing that and people would do that and then someone would get their tools credit card cut up because they were spending too much money. Today, I think it's a matter of making sure that you've got your entire workflow entirely dialed in so you know exactly how things are going to flow. What tools you're going to use in the cloud and you have a predicted cost for this. [00:26:32] Speaker B: But if this is done in the cloud, how are you front loading with this is what it's going to be, give or take. Given the cloud can vary hour to hour. What are some things that are done to kind of, kind of nail that in? [00:26:45] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I think one of the easy things is you go in and figure out your worst case scenario in terms of cost. So if I'm editing at the most expensive, expensive time of the, of the day, if I'm editing with the most expensive GPU setups, if I'm working with the largest amount of storage possible, how is this, how is this all going to cost? And making sure that I don't like go in and start, oh, I, I can get a transcript. You don't need a transcript, buddy. You got a script, stick to it. Making sure that those things are all predetermined and they're at the high level. So the only thing you can do is go down. I guarantee you no one's ever had a problem going back to the budget folks and saying, you know what, I didn't spend all the money. [00:27:27] Speaker B: And there's also the aftercare right after you work on that project. Where are you putting all that content? Are you putting it in archive? Are you putting it fiscal archive on Prem or is it in Glacier or some other clouds cold storage? [00:27:42] Speaker A: Yes. And I think that's, that's one of the things that a lot of people don't realize having lived in the post production facility space. Big show comes in, there's, you know, 40 people running around, we get the whole thing delivered, network loves it, everybody loves it, and everyone runs away. And then I walk over across the hall to the vault and the vault manager's like, what the hell am I going to do with all this stuff? And he's got a big box full of drives and disks and tapes and all sorts of crap. And there's no one left to call because everyone has gone off to the next gig. There's no one left standing. Someone does own that. And the thing there is at the end of a cloud based version of that, you're left with, here's all this stuff and yes, we can put it into Glacier and lower the price. Whose bill is that being footed by? And my thinking has always been, okay, as a post facility that has things running in the cloud, or a post facility that is cloud only. Okay, client, give me your glacier bucket. I will dump everything into it. And then I'm going to walk away. And now you can continue paying or not paying, that's up to you. It's like putting everything from the vault in a box, taping it up and saying, you know, return to sender, address the unknown. [00:29:05] Speaker B: But we've also seen a lot of rental facilities say, well, this is a potential money making opportunity, right? So we reduce the cost per hour. But then we say, well, we're going to charge you for every gig you transfer or every terabyte you store in our cloud, in our cloud storage. So it, on the flip side becomes something that can kind of be a little bit more, that can supplement that kind of loss in income. [00:29:23] Speaker A: It can, it depends upon how it's structured. So a lot of. And this is a problem also when we, as a, as a company that sells things, we have people that pop up and say, oh, I've got this show. Well, okay, what history do you have? You have no history. This is a brand new company. It's an entity that we've lit up for this. It may be part of this, but it's only part of this at this point. And at the end the funding goes away. So I'm left holding these things and these charges that no one is there to actually pay any longer. So. And that's part of why my thinking has always been at the end of a project, I'd love to be just handing this over to you if you want to, then run insights on it in the cloud to try to remonetize it or sell the entire library to something that's up to you. I don't need to be in the middle of that as much as I'd love to get my little sliver of whatever that could cost. But it's not worth the risk at that point. And I think that's really more risk motivated in the cloud. [00:30:25] Speaker B: So over a decade ago, I cut the cord, no more cable, and I started using VOD services. And a few months ago I was looking at it and I'm looking at all the different services I've added on for $15 or $20 a month. And I'm realizing, well, I'm not paying what I was paying for cable. It's getting closer. And when we start using the cloud for workflows, especially ones that you build yourself, they're not all in one. It becomes death by a thousand paper cuts. Because you're $15 or $75 a terabyte for this cloud editing tool, you're using this to make sure your Avid bins can still be shared. You're using this to make sure that there's a robust file transfer system. And so the hidden cost becomes all these little nickel and dime these VOD services, as it were, that you're adding on for every project that go. That go to the bottom line, which does. Which ultimately doesn't make you save as much money as you thought. [00:31:15] Speaker A: Well, and the other piece to that is a lot of times people don't understand that things can go wrong in the cloud. They can. It's amazing. So we had a major sports team that was putting things into the cloud, and it turns out that the methodology used was flagging them incorrectly. Instead of archive, they were being flagged as active. And there was also something happening where things were getting accidentally duplicated. So that started back in the fall, and then suddenly, a month and a half ago, people are looking at it going, where is this bill from? Right. What is this? No one was inspecting what they expected all the way along. Someone needs to go through and look at what those cloud bills are. Did I anticipate the $10,000 bill? Oh, that's fine. I expected 12. That's beautiful. I expected to spend $1,000 and not $10,000. That's a problem. So having someone, preferably on the accounting side, looking at that, knowing where we're supposed to have our spend and the fact that it's greater than we expected is something you need to do. I mean, AWS generates billing alerts. Those should be turned on, right? In our instance, it's turned on. You start spending money in our cloud. I know about it. [00:32:38] Speaker B: I would add to that that for years or for decades, we've had the concept of media managers in post production. Media managers do not equate to cloud engineers. And when you start bringing in folks who've done traditional media management or even just say, look, I've done DIT work or I know how to organize things. The cloud is a specialty point of knowledge. And so when you start putting stuff in the cloud, knowing what tier of storage to use, knowing your replication policies, knowing security policies, everything, you need to have someone who knows how to do that. And when you don't, you end up with bills like that because you have material sitting in the wrong locations or copies made thereof, and you also run that security risk well. [00:33:22] Speaker A: And the other piece to that is, I don't necessarily have to know. I can have something that can arbitrate that for me and explain it to me in a way that I understand. Yes, the accounting people, they look at bills and they, they know this is too high. If, if I have something like a kib or storage DNA fabric that can go out there, look at this and show, okay, you've got all this duplicated in all these different tiers in the cloud. Or you're expecting this to be in Glacier, but It's in standard S3 instead. I now can see that as a media manager and go, oh, that's supposed to be in tier two, not on tier one, or that's supposed to be on lto. It's not supposed to be over here. So being able to have something that will adapt and explain this to me as a media and entertainment professional, as opposed to an accounting professional or a cloud engineer, I think is the best thing. [00:34:19] Speaker B: So know what you don't know. Right. And then make sure there's something in place to supplement that. [00:34:25] Speaker A: Correct. And we talk to clients all the time about this. Hey, let's get you a dashboard software that will sit there and latch into your other pieces and be able to make sense of it all and possibly explain it all in a single pan of glass. Right. And that's the beautiful thing where it's like, here's what I expect, here's where it is. We're on track. Accounting's not going to try to kill me today. All right, let's get into a product rapid fire, because these are always fun. How are you going to determine what tools work where? Let's go with the pros and cons of. And let's say Suite Studio and LucidLink. [00:35:02] Speaker B: Well, as I said earlier, I think everyone should have at least a terabyte just to cover your butt. They're both similarly priced, both have enterprise security options. What I would take a look at is check out track records because you want to make sure that if you're working with some content that you need high availability for. You want to make sure that Lucid Link or Suite Studios are partnering with a cloud provider because they both are. They're partnering with a third party cloud provider. Make sure that the cloud providers they're using has a good track record of uptime. You don't want to settle on less expensive cloud storage to edit off of and find out there's been outages. [00:35:41] Speaker A: That makes sense. And I would say you need to also make sure you have asset management to know what you've got in those services, because if you don't, they're not for you. All right, let's get into what the NAS manufacturers bring to the table. Facilis Fast Cache. [00:35:59] Speaker B: If you already own Facilis. I mean obviously buying a NAS or a SAN is usually a big capex expenditure. So if you already have Facilis, it should be looking to see if your system can handle fast cash because then you don't have to rely on cloud storage. Even though I like it as a backup, you can remote directly into the Facilis from where you're editing from and get that performance. So it fits great for facilities who are not downsizing their footprint and are looking to buy or already have a facilits. [00:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the looking to buy makes a lot of sense there and looking to buy but don't necessarily want to pay for the ones we just mentioned. Suite Studio and lucid, right. It can fit in that space, it can behave similarly. But you are the source of truth for your own media. [00:36:44] Speaker B: One of the things I'd recommend is when we start getting into comparing storage solutions, it becomes like an eye chart or we used to call a cell phone plan comparison. Right? What, what checks what box. And that's where places like Key Code Media come into play. Because we sell these, we know exactly what boxes they tick and the real world boxes they tick, not the marketing ones. [00:37:06] Speaker A: We have a list of questions we go through and at the end it's like oh yeah, this particular thing fits. So SNS Nomad, what do you think? [00:37:14] Speaker B: SNS is wildly popular, so a lot of folks have sns. The fact that they have a tool that will create proxies from everything in your project makes it a lot easier than an editor going in there and saying, saying make proxies and manually putting that on a hard drive and then reconciling that. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of things. Also because it's working with some of the other tools that SNS has like Share Browser, which is a great first asset management system. It takes a lot of the responsibility off a creative to also be a media manager. [00:37:44] Speaker A: Makes sense. And the thing is I would say if you are an, if you are an edit once and then finish. Not for you. This is a proxy and finish workflow. You are working at home with proxy and then you're going to the office and finishing it there. Media Silo, something that you're aware of. [00:38:02] Speaker B: Media Silo. As I mentioned earlier, Frame's been around for a long time, but version four has had a couple hiccups. Media Silo has been around even longer than Frame IO for review and approve on demand review and approve. But they've recently changed their plan so it's not just groups of 10 or more. So now we're having individual folks who are saying, look, if I have an edit share, I can then use Media Silo or I can use Media Silo in place of Frame when I don't even have an edit share device. So it's a great alternative. And also, and this is kind of a little known secret is that there's a tool I believe called is it Spotlight with Media Silo that allows you to create a micro site for the content that you want to share out to people. So you no longer have to have your marketing team put it up on a website, put it on a cloud provider with a website to make it look nice. It's already built in. So that becomes a good alternative to Frame at a really good price point. [00:38:58] Speaker A: Makes sense to me. [00:39:00] Speaker B: Iodine Iodine is one of the coolest products to come out in the past couple years. You know, for unscripted television. They used to on high budget projects they put everything on a drive, then they'd handcuff it to someone and that person would get in a plane and fly across the country. So no one got their hands on that. That Iodine now has wickedly fast storage, but they also have ways to encrypt it and also manage the entire fleet. That gives you a type of security that you can't get with off the shelf. I almost said Firewire drives with off the shelf USB drives or Thunderbolt drives. So Iodine, when you need security, nothing else is going to match that makes sense. [00:39:40] Speaker A: So then we talked briefly about HP Anywhere Teradici. My feel is where that fit is if you are full cloud workflows, there is no other choice. When you are in the cloud and the broker setup, being able to make sure that Joe doesn't leave that system running over the weekend, I feel that is the perfect fit for that. However, the other workflows, I'm still a fan of Jump. [00:40:08] Speaker B: I like having a company to cover my butt and when I'm looking at Avid Edit on Demand or I'm looking at Adobe's albeit aged documents on deploying in the cloud, all of them reference HP Anywhere or Teradici. So I like having that kind of behind me as a. Well, you said it would work well. [00:40:26] Speaker A: And the other thing is we've tried other solutions in the cloud, they don't necessarily work. And that's one of the other benefits to contacting someone like Key Code Media. We try things, we're gearheads, we're nerds, we figure out what didn't work. [00:40:39] Speaker B: We've talked about a bunch of tools today and all of them will solve some problem you have right now. But what about the next project or next month or next year? No one wants to invest in something only to have it be obsolete next quarter. So maybe we should talk about future proofing and ways that clients can look forward to technology or where to go to for technology and ensure that what they're investing in or thinking about doing will actually work in the long term. [00:41:06] Speaker A: I think one of the big things here is the same problems in cloud workflows, in hybrid workflows are the same problems we've had for years with on PREM workflows. At the end of the process, you have stuff, you need to keep it somewhere that is safe and redundant to make sure that you can survive any sort of disaster. You don't want to worry about things like bit rot, right? Bit rot's a thing also, if you put it on physical media and it's just sitting somewhere. The other thing you need to worry about is mold. Mold is going to eat more media than anything else. It will destroy more media than anything else on this planet. It's already hard at work in different spots. That's why they have ovens to cook tapes. So over time, it needs to be in a inexpensive environment that's redundant. And the one thing that definitely has that is the hyperscalers. But you know, there's some fear, there's some uncertainty and doubt there, but I feel that you should have it in a cloud storage bucket as a complete disaster recovery play, no matter what. [00:42:22] Speaker B: The biggest thing, the biggest concern I have, and we're at an inflection point right now where this has to be addressed, is that we're continuing to. Continuing to generate more assets. We're not generating less, we're deleting less and keeping more. How do we find these? Well, traditionally that's been an asset management system, which is boring as hell. We all know asset management systems are not fun. It's not like opening up a brand new Mac and getting that new Mac smell right. Asset management is something that's always required someone on the front end to load with, entering metadata. Now that we have AI in various forms, utilizing an asset management solution, a MAM or a DAM that can plug into various AI systems makes total sense. Why should I have to go in and log everything? Why not use AI to do that? The problem is that AI is moving faster than our asset management system partners. So the underlying technology of those asset management systems can't handle the data based on every single frame of video that you have. So I can't recommend enough that you start looking into asset management. But you gotta make sure the asset management system you're looking into, which is usually a higher ticket item, can not only scan, but retain that metadata to be used in the future. The last thing you want is to scan 100 terabytes worth of content and find your asset management system. Takes 30 seconds to return a result. [00:43:43] Speaker A: Or you find out six months down the road that your asset management system's been bought by another company and they're going to spike the product. So this goes something that is near and dear to my heart. Metadata portability. Okay, I've got the data stored in this environment that I know is safe. If the things that allow me to search in this can then be exported and put over here next to it, I can then take that 10 years down the road. I can now take this and put it into an asset management system or. [00:44:10] Speaker B: A different storage system too. [00:44:12] Speaker A: Yeah, now I've got the whole thing portable. I have the way to go and recover, search and then recover. Because I don't want to have to necessarily pull it all out. And the other piece about the asset management system is it's only going to work with stuff that's online. It has to exist somewhere. So if it's sitting in a box in a cardboard box somewhere, that's not going to work. So it forces us to keep these things available so they're searchable, so that they then have value down the line. Because otherwise it's just like leaving the box back at the vault. No one cares any longer, right? Thanks for watching Broadcast to post, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast. To receive future episodes follow key code media on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. To receive news on additional AV broadcast and post production technology content. See you next time. Time, folks.