CLOUD EDITING GEAR.
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF EDITING
What used to be a cumbersome exercise, heavily dependent on a quality internet connection, now has a new lease of life. What’s changed?
WORDS. Robert Shepherd IMAGES. Various
R emember the days of being tethered to your editing suite, stuck in front of a bulky machine with limited processing power and tedious file transfer and render speeds? Well, for many that’s still the case. For others, there’s the cloud. With cloud editing, you can work from anywhere that has decent internet, collaborate with colleagues across the globe in real time and access powerful editing tools without emptying the bank for expensive hardware. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Cloud editing is clearly a major advancement in technology, in that you no longer have to wait for rushes to be delivered before you can edit. However, some say
together,” she explains. “And yes, bandwidth is key to success, more so when uploading media than the actual editing process; once we’re using the proxy edit files, the bandwidth requirements reduce to the point where average domestic provision is sufficient.” That said, Layton assures it’s less about bandwidth and more to do with managing expectations:
it’s quite cumbersome, especially when you’re dealing with huge files and a small bandwidth. Charlotte Layton, CCO at post house Racoon, explains how rushes still need to get from camera to the edit environment, and depending on the size of the files, that processing time still needs to be factored in. “When working on productions with hundreds of terabytes of media, we’d aim to turn the ‘upload and transcode to edit proxy’ process around overnight, but this will massively depend on what other work needs to be carried out to make the content edit-ready. If the sound was recorded out of camera and needs syncing, or cameras are cross-shooting and need grouping
BE THE CHANGE Charlotte Layton, CCO at post house Racoon, has overseen a cloud editing revolution
“More often than not it’s assumed that you can do anything you like, wherever you like,” she adds. “You know what they say about assumptions. The best way to tackle bandwidth bottlenecks is to centralise the
67. APRIL 2023
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