With production teams working outside of their home facility in ever-increasing numbers, remote work, remote production, and business continuity have become more important than ever. Video editors are working remotely more than ever, but what about all of the non-creative work that’s required, such as transcoding, making a screener, adding captions, changing frame rates, or creating archives.

The workflow becomes inefficient if those editing workstations (and their time) are tied up with media processing functions. That’s why many media companies have moved content into the cloud to remove dependencies on specific locations. This new way of working also facilitates close collaboration between production team members and results in higher productivity and sustained creativity.

Therefore, a critical component of any media business plan is to ensure that users remain productive while maintaining an uninterrupted level of security and control over access to content and related resources. In most cases the cloud can be the missing link to unlimited access.

Business Continuity

In the area of Business Continuity, the cloud allows media businesses to keep working even though a crew is remotely located. It also allows the organization’s staff to have unlimited access to media files as if they were working at the main studio or production facility. Likewise, the same tools that are used to create content “At Home” can be extended into the field and deployed just as effectively to automate high-volume media transcoding and quality analytics tasks.

However, as your media processing system is installed on servers on premise, you still have to remotely log in to the software and applications on those servers. Accessing content from outside a facility often requires arduous security log-in information. So, you have to provide team members with those login tools, and you’ve got to make sure that any IT firewalls can be addressed. 

Automated Media Processing

Once the remote access process has been navigated, producers and editors can begin to run certain aspects of those workflows that process media (change file formats, create captions, etc.) in the background as the team continues its work without interruption. You can also upload an entire workflow and run it in the cloud. Then ABR ladders and a variety of formats can be created for cloud-based OTT delivery to the myriad of media consumption devices in use today.

With a media processing platform like Telestream Vantage, users can work within the IT parameters (firewalls) set by the organization because the cloud-connected actions are actually part of the workflow that’s running within the firewall. In this way you never have any problems with IT security protections.

With a media processing platform that is instinctively adaptive to the situation at hand, users can perform many transcoding duties with minimal human intervention. This scalable, software-enabled media processing platform can be leveraged to manage all media services from the camera to the point of distribution. It can even allow content owners, producers, and distributors to quickly, easily, and cost-effectively ingest, edit, transcode, QC, package, monetize, and distribute their media.

If you are an employee at a postproduction house who is tasked with QCing content that is being prepped for air, but you’re working at home and remotely from the physical media is stored, reliable remote access to media processing can be a lifesaver. Complete remote access and file sharing are also dependent upon available bandwidth. In most cases, that file is going to wind up in a cloud-based archive.

The media processing platform can also be used to free up bandwidth by reducing file sizes and creating proxy files for editors to begin working as soon as a file arrives at your workstation. 

Viewing Large Files Over The Internet

Another challenge to remote operations is working with very large mezzanine and professional-grade files that are stored in a different location. These huge files can’t be viewed over the Internet as is, due to bandwidth restraints. Therefore, in order to view those files, you would have to be physically attached to where they are stored. Because these files can be hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes in size, workarounds, including creating proxies or downloading, are not viable. Too much time is wasted.

To solve this problem, Telestream has developed “GLIM”. Designed for post production as well as ingest QC, engineering, master control, news, and more, GLIM enables media professionals to play full resolution, mezzanine-grade media files from their centralized storage, over the internet, from a web browser.

GLIM was built to solve well-known remote work challenges where remote employees waste hours every day downloading mezzanine grade media files just so they can be played back. Many collaborative video production applications require transcoding prior to uploading to the site. GLIM allows users to play files immediately, from a browser interface, without any delays caused by creating proxies, waiting for massive downloads, or transcoding and uploading to sharing applications. It supports playback, frame scrubbing & stepping and display of file properties and metadata. The GLIM playback experience is vastly superior to remote and virtual desktop techniques.