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Collaborative video editing when working from home

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
May 17, 2021
9 replies
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Hi,

We have a couple of users who are editing videos in Adobe Premier and collaborating on the same video, and obviously due to the pandemic they are working from home.

We have set them up with OneDrive and SharePoint so the source files sync to the cloud, and they can make the files they need available locally on their hard drives when required to work on a project, but they are not happy with this solution. They have tried saving the files to a Windows network drive and accessing them over the VPN, but obviously that's worked terribly. So they have come to us to ask for another solution.

So I'm wondering what other people are doing in your companies? I'm hoping there is some sort of best practise out there, but I'm guessing most video production is done by small freelance companies who don't have the resources to work from home and are probably working in a small office somewhere and hoping they don't catch COVID. But I'm hoping someone has implemented something that is working well.

Thanks,

Dan

How to

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Kevin-Monahan

HI Sasha,

Good question. I think you are looking for a recommendation from Adobe, but I don't think we have any official ones to make. I can offer up what I've seen work from my colleagues Dave Helmly and Jon Barrie. They showed a pretty nice workable solution from Lucid Link without a lot of cost. I don't even think you need a Teams account, but you'd need to check with Lucid Link. The Productions workflow can be taken advantage of, however, and that's what Dave and JB show in the following video. Our ACPs, Neil and Mo use this setup as well and advocate for its use.

Not an official nod, just an opinion. Hope it provides some guidance.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin-Monahan

Correct answer

Community Manager

HI Sasha,

Good question. I think you are looking for a recommendation from Adobe, but I don't think we have any official ones to make. I can offer up what I've seen work from my colleagues Dave Helmly and Jon Barrie. They showed a pretty nice workable solution from Lucid Link without a lot of cost. I don't even think you need a Teams account, but you'd need to check with Lucid Link. The Productions workflow can be taken advantage of, however, and that's what Dave and JB show in the following video. Our ACPs, Neil and Mo use this setup as well and advocate for its use.

Not an official nod, just an opinion. Hope it provides some guidance.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

F

Festive_Cascade5D22

Known Participant

Thank you Kevin! I am already in touch with LucidLink folks...

R Neil Haugen

Legend

My partner Mo and I have found the LucidLink staff to offer excellent support. Amazing attention to their clients.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

S

salvo34

Inspiring

thanks for clarification you guys, re: sharing stuff online etc.

is interesting but never use it as my edit computer isn't connected to internet ever ( since initial setup and updates I took out the wire to internet ).

I can use laptop with internet but screens are different so I could only look at basic stuff and not quality of images and sound etc.

I've done that and it's close enough for hobby stuff IMO.

S

salvo34

Inspiring

upload and download, compression ( time ) and comprehensive product ( story 😞

I just finished reading 'the mark of zorro' book.

the protagonist girl was enamored of zorro due to his actions, bravado to stop bad people from oppressing people in LA.

all the dialogue in the book was this:

girl to zorro: upload fast

zorro to girl: download slow and secretive ( mask )

social and political plot and subplots: live in harmony and honestly with rich people making sure regular people were not maltreated.

( zorro was a cabellero and managed to clean up the neighborhood, with his ethics shared with fellows of the same morality basically )

If you think you can tell a story and work collaborately with others, think about what happens when you have too many cooks in the kitchen.

If you want to play and have fun and never in your life make a tv commercial worth national distribution or a movie for distribution, just keep trying to find a new way to edit ( live ) your iphone videos.

I can't believe how ridiculous this conversation is about.

you want to share stuff , send SSD's and hard drives via overnight mail delivery and they send you the stuff back the next day after they do what they want ( presumably cause you managed with words over the phone, storyboards and script revisions ) to get back what you invision... if you are the main chef.

jeez, what a mish mash of trash this is becoming.. stay tuned for another episode of " america's got talent'

M

Michael Grenadier

Legend

are you directing this at ME!!!! (outrage is purely joking) for me this is about allowing a client to watch me editing which although not always ideal, is sometimes necessary. They are not doing any editing just reviewing edits as they happen and helping select ins and outs, etc. This is one of the ways I've always worked but over the last year in particular meeting with the client in person is not always an option. I've known editors who refuse to work with the client in the room, but sometimes that's not the way the foodchain works. Editors as far as I know, never get final cut... and sometimes the best way to work is to involve the director or other client in to the edit room so they have to take responsibility for the choices that are made instead of just saying "make it better."

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Salvo,

In this time, it ain't that gloried days of yesteryear no more. Not hardly. Pretty unbelievable how much things changed over the last year.

Remote collaboration has been the main process for much ... really most ... pro video work over the last year. The pro colorists I work with daily from all over the world have been either working at home or ... for a few ... as they're about the only one in their shop, their shop. These are the people working the main commercials for b-cast, for the movies, and for the major streaming services like Netflix and Disney. This ain't YouTube work. Period.

But with no client attended sessions in person. Yet their clients need to watch the work being done and comment as is usual and necessary. So they've been trying every remote service possible, checking for reliability, security, latency, and possible color managment controls. As have the editors and VFX and sound people.

The entire post production chain has been mostly remote working ... period. Yet the directors and DPs need to see what the editors are doing ... what the VFX folk are doing ... what the colorists are doing ... what sound is doing. ... in real-time, just as if they were all in the same facility. And security needs to be up to the task.

So files are being transferred online like never before, with highly encrypted services like LucidLink. Which Adobe and LucidLink have hooked up for my partner in Cape Town SA and myself in Oregon. There are several other similar services, including through Frame.io and various sources.

For some projects, you can even work with online asset storage. Mo and I have worked some things where the assets are on an Amazon S3 server in London, seen by our computers as a virtual local drive. We've been able to actually work in this situation where the assets are not physically present on our systems ... our system is just tricked into thinking it suddenly has this other massive drive attached. And PrPro and Ae and MediaEncoder work with the media living in London as if it was here. Occasionally if the 'net slows for a moment, it can stutter. But it's been pretty amazing.

And quite a few of my colorist pals have bought a bunch of newer iPads, there's a particular model that they can modify some internal settings and the things actually look pretty close to their in-suite Flanders reference monitors. They have those delivered for use by the client while they're working on the session, with the client sitting in their own place, and talking either via phone or the particular 'net service they're sending visual over. This because of course getting the clients seeing something even close to their reference monitors "remote" is nearly impossible.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

R Neil Haugen

Legend

That might work for the project files, which are handled and stored via Adobe's Cloud ... though the upload especially is worrisome.

No media living on a cloud service would work at that speed, they'd need it local on their machine.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

D

default0ymdhsp2oiwlAuthor

Participant

The users internet at home is measuring roughly 50mpbs download 10 mpbs upload, with a ping of around 10.

Would this be sufficent to use Adobe Premier Teams and Creative Cloud files?

Thanks,

Dan

R Neil Haugen

Legend

One of the bigger advantages in using Adobe's TeamProjects version is catching and resolving the changes in projects worked on simultaneously by different editors. This is caught and handled beautifully and simply in TP, and can be a right pain if not working TP on the same project.

TP media management is different and can be a right pain if someone doesn't follow proper TP practices. Yea, I've been the person that screwed up a project and had to sort the mess I created out. NOT pretty. But once you know to NEVER EVER EVER use the normal import/ingest processes unless you are the Creator of that TP, it's fine.

Leaving one with the biggest problem being getting the same media everywhere.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

M

Michael Grenadier

Legend

what I would love is a solution similar to what was available in fcp7 where clients could "watch" over my shoulder as I edited, viewing either the source or canvas remotely. You needed a decent internet connection but nothing too taxing and the quality was decent. And it was rocksolid. Apple of course broke the feature in an OS update (just another reason I hate apple). I've worked remotely with clients watching via zoom and teamviewer and supervised remote editors this way, but the results are mediocre to say the least.

Warren Heaton

Community Expert

iChat Theater in Final Cut Pro classic was amazing. I believe Apple deliberately deprecated it as they didn't plan to support it with AV Foundation Frameworks.

Sofi Marshall came up with a pretty slick way of re-creating something like it using Blackmagic Design's Web Presenter (it turns HDMI input into a web cam that can be selected in video converencing software like Zoom):

THE ULTIMATE REAL-TIME REMOTE EDITING WORKFLOW (THAT WON’T BREAK THE BANK)
https://sofimarshall.com/real-time-remote-editing/

Since Sofi wrote that blog, Blackmagic had updated the Web Presenter as well as added the capability to one of it's smaller video monitor/field recorders.

I found a modified version of what Sofi came up with where you route the HDMI-out of Premiere Pro on your video workstation to the web cam USB-in for the workstation to the Zoom call on the workstaion and then join the Zoom call via another device to work pretty well. Not nearly as easy or even nice as iChat Theater was, but a lot of what set Apple's solutions apart back in the Final Cut Studio days are lost to time.

Warren Heaton

Community Expert

Some options to consider in addition to Adobe Team Projects and still be using Premiere Pro:

You can configure something like Resilio Sync to share and sync files across the local storage at each editor's remote location. Once linked via the Sync Home Pro software, the files sync peer-to-peer whenever the peers are online.
https://www.resilio.com/individuals/
If you want everything to be "in the cloud", you could go with virtual workstations configured with Premiere Pro or just about any creative software that may be needed for your projects.
https://www.beboptechnology.com/bebop-virtual-workstations

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Team Projects is the form of Premiere workflow you need to use, Ann is correct about that.

As to supplying media ... TP has very specific and different media management than "stand-alone" projects. The "owner/creator" of the project adds media via typical import/ingest processes. Everyone else links to the media as available to their system through the Edit/Team Projects/Media Management dialog box. Always.

My partner is in Cape Town, SA. I'm in a small town in western Oregon, USA. We are working via the LucidLink transport service, and they are parking our shared media/files on the Amazon S3 servers in London. And it works pretty well.

LucidLink creates a 'virtual drive' on the local computer that is a re-creation of the actual files layout on the real servers. And our computers access the data (heavily encrpted I might note) directly.

It works amazingly well for most things. And is vastly superior to Dropbox, WeTransfer and a couple other things we tried.

You should also go check out the Team Projects forum on these Adobe user forums. Very specialized help which you will need, and a couple staffers from the development team for TP PrPro check in daily over there.

As do I.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

D

default0ymdhsp2oiwlAuthor

Participant

Thanks for that, good to know the performance is up to scratch for the cloud storage. What sort of speed internet connection do you need?

R Neil Haugen

Legend

As fast as possible for media online storage. Pretty good if it's just the project being in the Adobe CC cloud (which is where the project files live for TP work).

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Ann Bens

Community Expert

This might work for you: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/team-projects.html

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