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Why Apple's Severance gets edited over remote desktop software
- beached_whale 2y agoThis is similar to how Steam Remote Play works too, it uses RDP. A lot of tasks work really well over remote desktop.
- Havoc 2y agoRemote play isn't actually RDP. Similar concept but different protocol
- wtallis 2y agoIs the protocol actually based on RDP, or is it merely achieving a similar purpose?
- rcarmo 2y agoWell, it is similar to RDP with H.264 (and yes, you can do H.264 in RDP, and yes, the text has no artifacts), but not RDP where it regards authentication.
- Mindwipe 2y agoOh yeah, this is completely true. It would be a shoebox that barely ran Windows 98 and it wouldn't make much difference, and Apple's tools have completely failed to keep pace with this reality.
- whalesalad 2y agoMakes sense why the framerate is so bad during some of the playback scenes. Also makes sense as multiple editors will be sharing the same editing tasks and it’s easier to share a single resource with the scenes loaded that are connected to local storage, and manipulate remotely, versus trying to pull that content to your machine and then push it back.
- chris_pie 2y agoI have to say, I laughed when I noticed the framerate, in what's (in a way) a hardware ad
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eddieroger 2y agoSaving a click and a lot of editorializing: * More powerful machines centrally located * COVID-19 practices make lots of people in one place undesirable * It's easy for rogue editors to steal stuff, and this prevents that
- curiousgal 2y agoWe've had this setup in the investment bank where I work for a couple of years now, Citrix though.
- citizenpaul 2y agoThat was a lot of words to reiterate that Apple is a consumer focused company. Not enterprise or B2B.
- turtletontine 2y agoBingo. So many decisions made perfect sense once I realized Apple is basically a lifestyle brand that makes electronics, and Microsoft is a massive bureaucratic B2B conglomerate. Totally explained Microsoft’s ineptitude with consumer facing products (remember Windows Phone? Zune?), yet they have a stranglehold on the business world. This is the opposite: Apple is designed for locking individuals into its lifestyle (or ecosystem, if you prefer), and has mostly given up on enterprise facing products.
- 12_throw_away 2y agoHeh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...
- robocat 2y agoI also wish Microsoft would treat developers as a seperate customer segment to market to. When the people using your tools hate the tools, that isn't a good sign.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoI would like to use this comment to mention Parsec. It's unbelievable how much snappier it feels compared to the default Screen Sharing. What is their secret sauce?! I just wish it didn't require an internet connection for authentication
- kjeldsendk 2y agoOn gpu encoding/decoding of the frame buffer
- TZubiri 2y agoHow would it not require an internet connection lmao, it's a remote connection tool
- kjeldsendk 2y agoI think op meant cloud based in the sense you have to create a user account on their site and everything goes through that.
- hackinthebochs 2y agoRemote desktop between computers on a local network
- TZubiri 2y agoI guess, but I thought the selling point of parsec is that it reduces lag (or hides it). This would make sense in VPN environments though.
- xoa 2y ago>How would it not require an internet connection lmao, it's a remote connection tool I'm kinda surprised you've managed to be on HN for 5 years and never come across the concept of a "LAN" or "VPN" before, but I guess you're one of today's lucky 10000. To the first, sometimes you have machines (or VMs) local to your own network but in another physical location that you'd like to be able to access from your own system. It's a fairly significant use case, and one where no internet connection is involved whatsoever. For example it's generally desirable to locate powerful (and in turn generally loud) servers and associated gear (including environmental control, redundant power etc) in physically isolated locations from where the humans are working for noise reasons if nothing else, though security and efficiency are important as well. While it's possible to pipe raw video over IP, a quality remote desktop solution will generally be more flexible/scalable and doesn't require special (expensive) extra hardware and potentially additional fiber. And for systems located on other LANs remote from your own, you can use a VPN to link them securely as if they had a direct physical (though higher latency/more jittery) link, again avoiding any exposure to the public net. That then reduces to the above. In both cases it's desirable to have zero unnecessary 3rd party dependencies.
- kjeldsendk 2y agoAvid does have a cloud based solution. This isn't that. It's a clever way to have your media centralized and yet have access to editors all over the world. And a modern AVID system does not struggle with a few editors accessing the same footage. First of all it's usually a proxy format and Secondly the storage can deliver a combined 800MB pr box sustained for x number of editors at the same time. Yes I avid feel free to ask.
- fragmede 2y agoHave you used an Editshare?
- kjeldsendk 2y agoI actually tried the first version.. back in the day. But even if NEXIS is stupid expensive it's still acceptable if you have the productions for it. One of the main reasons it's used in larger post houses is the hardware and software support that is world wide with people on site if needed.
- johnklos 2y agoNothing these days "struggle(s) with a few editors accessing the same footage". AVID hasn't been at the forefront of video editing since the Avid/1 / ABVB days. They sell a reasonably usable program with horrible hardware (since Meridien hardware - it's good they finally let us use other hardware such as BlackMagic), but never truly fix large problems. People therefore stay on a specific version of the software for ages, because everyone is scared of new and different bugs. AVID's shared media offerings are tenfold the cost of other storage options simply because they have a flag on the mounted volumes that tells Media Composer to allow project and media sharing. "800MB pr box sustained" means nothing because anyone can do that easily with commodity hardware. In other words, AVID is milking their cash cow and they really don't innovate or even try to offer a good product. Apple, on the other hand, destroyed their professional editing products, then replaced them with decent tools, but ones that are worlds different. Many people have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, if you want to edit 8K ProRes, Final Cut Pro makes it simple on any ARM-based Mac.
- TZubiri 2y agoLooks good, don't see the drawback for this usecase "These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them. Sure, there's an Apple logo in the top-left corner (two, actually), but it feels superfluous, knowing that the software isn’t directly on the machine and it just as easily be running on a Windows or Linux box a thousand miles away" But the source AND target of the remote connections are both macs, pretty straightforward
- leshenka 2y agothe point they make is that if you're using a remote desktop program to remotely edit videos you don't need a mac on the client side. what would have been a far better PR is if Final Cut offered enterprise solution with "server" part that holds videos and does the heavy lifting and "client" part that works with miniatures doesn't let you export anything to disk and all that
- TZubiri 2y agoSo the criticism is that Apple isn't vendor locking and offers compatibility between OS? Not something I would expect to see on HN
- leshenka 2y agoI'm not advocating for vendor locking, it's not what I said. I said if they wanted to advertise macs for enterprise video editing they should have implemented this in FCP natively. This however wouldn't be vendor locking because remoting would still be an option. Instead they've shown that remote desktop is the most reliable way to do this kind of job because there isn't anything better.
- ajaimk 2y agoThe real reason is cause we can. The technology and internet speeds have evolved to make editing video over RDP possible.
- llm_nerd 2y agoIt looks like an absolutely brutal way to edit video[1], even with an incredible internet connection. This is a compromise courtesy of the reality of the Apple hardware ecosystem and not some sort of ideal way of working. Sometimes I play Civilization through an RDP connection to my desktop box below my desk over a dedicated ethernet connection and that's bad enough. Trying to do full video editing, with critical concerns over every pixel, color and timing....oof! [1] - as they note, you can see him doing it over the remote connection and it looks hurky-jerk disastrous.
- CharlesW 2y ago> This is a compromise courtesy of the reality of the Apple hardware ecosystem… They're still editing on a Mac, just remotely, which is how you know that this choice is not a compromise caused by the Apple hardware ecosystem.
- harrall 2y agoI was a diehard PC person but getting colors to display right and consistently on Apple hardware is much easier… so I admitted defeat. p.s. I’m the guy that will point out that one of your white lightbulbs has a slight greener tint over your other white lightbulbs (aka it’s not slight to me).
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoIt’s crazy how much of a mess color management is on Windows, even now. I used to try to use a calibrator-produced profile for my gaming PC’s monitor but keeping it applied was hacky and it still didn’t work everywhere.
- fathermarz 2y agoThey did mention it outright by saying something along the lines of “remote into”. I don’t see this being a show stopper for the use case.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- megadata 2y agoThe Thin Client idea dates back to the 80s at least. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client
- 486sx33 2y agoI’m not convinced they were ever trying to say a Mac mini could create a production film on its own. This isn’t how post production works…
- pier25 2y agoI'm surprised at this point Apple still doesn't have some sort of solution for cloud/remote editing integrated into Final Cut. What I mean is a native desktop GUI but with the video files streaming from a remote location for the previews, thubmnails, etc. Heck, the GUI could even be a web app.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 2y agoLatency?
- kelseyfrog 2y agoMore than remote desktop?
- pier25 2y agoIf the GUI is running locally I don't think latency would be that bad given that you're not on the other side of the world and you have a decent connection.
- thomassmith65 2y agoThey had the beginnings of that, but they discontinued it 15 years ago: Final Cut Server: • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Server • https://unflyingobject.com/posts/final-cut-server https://unflyingobject.com/posts/final-cut-server (2007)
- therein 2y agoHe isn't even using Final Cut. That should tell you how good of a job Apple is doing with FCP.
- pier25 2y agoAvid is the industry standard and has been for years. Doesn't matter how good or bad FC is. Even DVR hasn't been able to compete even though it's probably the industry standard for grading.
- fumufumufumu 2y ago[flagged]
- nkotov 2y agoI liked this season a lot though I didn't enjoy the filler episodes.
- grandempire 2y agoBut they are still using a Mac at the end? What’s the point of this story?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago> requirements in its EULA that seem designed to protect its hardware business above all else To get this you have to understand Apple's business model. They sell style, quality, and exclusivity, and ease of use. They can't ensure those things if they separate the hardware from the software. I'm sure they would love to make money from software licenses without the hardware. But it would end up creating new problems that would dilute the value of their product. The proof is in the pudding. They're the most valuable company in the world because of their limitations, not despite them.
- pier25 2y agoMaybe the remote stuff was just to edit on set or in a hotel room or something?
- jedberg 2y agoI use Keynote to make my presentations, and one time I wanted to build a presentation with someone else. I asked my friend who has worked at Apple for 20 years, "How do you guys build Keynote presentations together? There doesn't seem to be an easy way to do that?". He said, "We don't collaborate at Apple because of the (perceived) risk of leaks. None of our tools are built for collaboration". Apple is famously closed about information sharing, to the point where on some floors every office requires its own badge, and sometimes even the cabinets within. So it doesn't surprise me that their video editing tools are designed for a single user at a time. Edit: This happened about six years ago, they have since added some collaboration tools, however it's more about the attitude at Apple in general and why their own tools lag on collaboration. Edit 2: After the replies I thought I was going crazy. I actually checked my message history and found the discussion. I knew this happened pre-COVID, but it was actually in 2013, 12 years ago. I didn't think it was that long ago.
- galad87 2y agoThat's a weird answer, Keynote can shares presentations, and multiple people can work on the same presentation in real-time, either on the macOS/iOS or the web version. The feature has been available for years: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/keynote/tan4e89e275c/mac https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/keynote/tan4e89e275c/m...
- jedberg 2y ago> Note: Not all Keynote features are available for a shared presentation. That's the main issue. But also this happened about six years ago.
- galad87 2y agoThe collaboration features were introduced in 2013 on the web version, and in 2016 on the native versions. And maybe check which features are actually not available before dismissing it.
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- NaOH 2y agoActual Title: Severed Edits >...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. >Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- freedomben 2y agoI'm normally a big believer in that rule, but in this case the original title is absolutely terrible
- mubou 2y agoOP used the page <title>/og:title
- cromulent 2y agoWell, from the web page source: <title>Why Apple’s Severance Gets Edited Over Remote Desktop Software</title> <h1>Severed Edits</h1> So it seems correct.
- m3kw9 2y agoNope cloud and local processing is always gonna be 2 things and not one will replace the other. Cloud has been around, and if you look at games nobody wants to play their game thru a service like Stadia.
- kevinsync 2y agoUltimately / objectively I agree, but subjectively I'm not so sure -- I recently gave NVIDIA GeForce NOW a whirl (cloud gaming, $19.99/month (cheaper prepaid) for an 'Ultimate' account which instantly connects you to an RTX 4080 VM + HDR + max 240fps) and it just works. Super smooth, realtime gameplay at max graphics. I wanted to test it out given that my son was looking to upgrade his PC and not only are component costs through the roof, there's barely any inventory to be had if you were trying to buy exactly what you want! (thanks, resellers...) It's not a perfect setup obviously -- really only ideal for AAA games with cloud saves, no mods, etc (Cyberpunk 2077, that kind of thing), and I won't make the argument that it's ultimately better than local for gaming (it's not), but I will say that in my experience, the hardware-rendered framerates are through the roof, it streams seamlessly at high resolution, and I could see envision a scenario where video editing on an appropriate VM should be virtually indistinguishable from local. Just food for thought!
- medos 2y agoCouldn't the traffic be LAN? Everyone keeps mentioning 'over the internet' - the device they're doing the editing on could be in a different room in the same building over gigabit++ speeds.
- int0x29 2y agoThere is very little good reason to have this setup if you are in the same building as it.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhat? On prem multi user remote desktop servers used by on prem users are extremely common.
- overvale 2y agoThe reason is to never allow anyone (even the editors) to have actual access to the show's files/images. Remote software can prohibit copy/paste, file transfers, and screenshots. I worked in a post facility with 100s of people all remoting in to a server rack down the hall.
- vsviridov 2y agoMost editing software, eg DaVinci Resolve allows editing with low resolution proxies, and final rendering is done with the full size footage
- atonse 2y agoFinal Cut Pro also lets you edit with proxies…………… I think.
- mattl 2y agoIt does, yes. https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/create-optimized-and-proxy-files-verb8e5f6fd/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/create-optimiz... Which is how I’m editing stuff on an 8Gb original M1 Mac Mini and it just works.
- secabeen 2y agoI've seen NICE DCV be used for this too. Amazon bought them, so it's free if the server end is on AWS, but they will also sell you licenses for your own hardware too. It's essentially 4k60 video streaming where the video is your desktop and they use all the tricks they've developed for media streaming here as well.
- nickdothutton 2y agoThere are a number of reasons why the industry centralises. Particularly in post. One of them is the fact that the shot footage is insured and those policies have very strict clauses about handling the material. Yes this applies to an all-digital production as it would have applied to the film era.
- kmeisthax 2y agoInsurance companies haven't yet grokked "Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe" yet. Unless the insurance is anti-piracy insurance?
- cbozeman 2y agoI suspect that's a big reason. Remember about a decade back or so when Fox had four of it's upcoming television shows leaked onto public and private tracker sites about six months before their actual premieres? Lucifer, Minority Report, Blindspot, and Carmichael were all leaked, and those shows were on different networks, which means it was likely a third-party company that was doing effects in post. I don't recall if it was ever sussed out what exactly happened and now they all got leaked, but it definitely made the industry a bit warier.
- Aurornis 2y agoSpreading copies around ad-hoc isn’t a backup plan. They have redundancy and backups. > Unless the insurance is anti-piracy insurance? This is a big part of it, actually. Content that leaks prior to launch can reduce revenues significantly. Both from lost viewership due to people already having seen it, and from negative reviews of the unfinished early edits. Many movies change significantly for the better from early cuts.
- a-dub 2y agoit's pretty standard these days i think. i remember aws having some hyperlocal low latency POPs with graphics capabilities for this specific purpose. i think there have also been a handful of purpose built remote desktop packages that were purpose built.
- LASR 2y agoOh how far we've come. My home internet is a fiber gigabit 3g/3g up/down. Tucked away under the staircase is where my fiber ONT terminates and it is my server room. I have half a dozen boxes running various things. 4 symmetric 2012 i7 mac minis running linux KVM, and hosting various critical services - pihole, home automation, Homekit Secure Video etc. Then there a giant former gaming PC with 7 HDD bays running the entire storage backend for a whole load of GoPro/Osmo/Insta360 videos I capture. Rclone to Google Photos for back-up. I don't edit any videos. Just there to capture memories so I can at some point when AI tools get good enough just have it generate clips. Same box runs my plex server with HW transcoding. Then there is the actual gaming PC, a mini-ITX running steam remote play. Has power, a network cable and a fake HDMI dongle that emulates a monitor to trick the GPU into thinking something is actually plugged in. Basically everything I do with desktop PCs at home is via some sort of remote interface. Remote gaming is probably the most demanding of all of these. Low-latency HW-accelerated solutions eg: Parsec / steam-link are incredible technologies. I carry an AppleTV + PS5 controllers to friends' houses and play the latest games across the internet.
- deadbabe 2y agoThe most impressive thing here is that you physically go to friends houses to play games together.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoThe real question is why arent they using Final Cut Pro? And does the composer using Logic?
- WorldPeas 2y agoI will post a text to a friend of mine from a day ago: "I use my iphone to access pwas on my server so I can use it as a computer. I use my computer for x forwarding so I can use my server's programs." I'm not the norm but isn't it telling when I don't want to use your hardware, I have to? I want to enjoy these products, but their immutability compared to prior versions is a thorn in my side.
- geocar 2y agoI don't get that at all. I've been doing something like this since before the iPhone ever existed because I like having a logfile of all of my inputs and outputs, and I like being extremely mobile. Immutability means that if my phone gets smashed or stolen, I can just go buy a new one and not lose my shit. What's the thorn? These days I think do something very similar to your friend. I pack an external keyboard and mouse I like, and a chromecast (just in case) and that's it. Not packing a big screen and a battery is just a huge bonus.
- WorldPeas 2y agoThe thorn is that if I wanted to run a python program, download a mp4 and convert it or to edit a html file (all things I got hamstrung doing recently), I couldn't because the IPhone restricts access to its shell, as well as several common features in its forced web driver you can't opt out of. My phone is immutable yes, but what's the point if its immutable state doesn't do what you want it to
- geocar 2y agoI'm not sure I understand what you mean, and I'm not sure you do either. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438 among others will give you access to shell including python, vi, and at least curl.
- thatswhoweneed 2y agoa super easy way to work on big video files and not worry about the hassle of remote desktop and the back and forth with the team, versioning, etc.. is lucidlink (https://www.lucidlink.com/ https://www.lucidlink.com/). A content creation collaboration tools lots of studios use. The app makes accessing cloud files as smooth and fast on your laptop as if they were local.
- tobi_bsf 2y ago[flagged]
- impoppy 2y agoVideo editing is not as portable as coding, there ain't no git. It doesn't surprise me that they have to do that, I imagine it's simply speedier and comfier to connect to a desktop that already has the work in progress in the latest state instead of ensuring everything is synced on different devices one uses. I also imagine that beefy MBPs with M3 and upwards could handle 4K editing of Severance (or maybe 8K) and they'd edit on local machines, should it be actually more convenient than connecting to a remote desktop. It's a bit shameful to admit, but still something we have to deal with while having such crazy advances in technology.
- Uehreka 2y agoWhen I got into projection design I tried using git to keep track of my VFX workspace. After typing `git init` I heard a sharp knock at my apartment door. I opened it to find an exhausted man shaking his head. He said one word, “No.” and then walked away. Undeterred by this ominous warning, I proceeded to create the git repo anyway and my computer immediately exploded. I have since learned that this was actually the best possible outcome of this reckless action.
- impoppy 2y agoAll jokes aside, it's too big of a pain in the ass to have that stuff version controlled. Those file formats weren't meant to be version controlled. If there's persistent Ctrl-Z that's good enough and that's the only thing non technical people expect to have. Software should be empathetic and the most empathetic way to have the project available everywhere is either give people a remote machine they can connect to or somehow share the same editor state across all machines without any extra steps.
- jiggawatts 2y agoIn principle a good editing tool could use Git for the edit operations (mere kilobytes!) and use multi-resolution video that can be streamed and cached locally on demand.
- ddtaylor 2y agoAnother story about Apple users are upset about how they sell/license their software.
- crazygringo 2y agoI mean, of course. The source video files for an entire season of 4K TV are friggin' huge, and you want different editors to be able to work in different locations. The article argues: > To me, though, it highlights a huge issue with Apple’s current professional offerings. They are built to work on a single machine. At least for high-end use cases, the remote workflow threatens to cut them out of the equation entirely... This is hardly a "huge issue". Plenty of people work on a single machine. Once your project gets too big, you move more and more to remote and cloud. It's a spectrum, and you want a machine flexible enough to handle both.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoInteresting, but this misses perhaps the most embarrassing part: They're using Avid and not FCP. I also don't buy the author's rationale for remote editing; it's oddly archaic: "high-end video production is quite storage-intensive, which is why your favorite YouTuber constantly talks about their editing rigs and network-attached storage. By putting this stuff offsite, they can put all this data on a real server." Storage is cheap now, and desktop computers are more than powerful enough for any video editing. Any supposed advantage of remote "real servers" is going to be squandered by having to send everything over the Internet. The primary benefit of remote editing (and the much-hyped "camera to cloud") is fast turnaround, which you need for stuff like reality TV and news. But a dramatic series like Severance? It is pretty baffling that Apple would create a PR vehicle that impugns its products like this. It would be better to say nothing. After Apple acquired Shake, they splashed Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and other major tentpoles on the Apple homepage at every opportunity... of course not mentioning that Weta was rendering those movies on hundreds of Linux servers instead of Macs. But at least Shake was the same product across all platforms, and it really was the primary effects tool on all those movies. "they do not mention the use of Jump Desktop, which seems like a missed opportunity to promote a small-scale Mac developer. C’mon Apple, do better.) Oh boy, this is just a minor infraction in Apple's history of disrespect toward developers. They do this, and worse, to major development partners too. I'm not going to name names, but after one such partner funded the acquisition of material on its own equipment and that material was used in a major product keynote... Apple not only neglected to credit or even mention that partner, but proceeded to show the name of a totally uninvolved competitor in its first slide afterward. The level of betrayal there was shocking.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoSorry, this take is not good. Yes, attaching many terabytes of video is cheap now. But scrubbing through that high res raw video isnt (just) size intensive. Its throughput intensive. Size : throughput :: energy density : power density. You can get pretty good all SSD NAS but using a 40Gbps (5GBps, minus overhead) Thunderbolt 4 is still gonna be ok but not stellar. A single desktop SSD can triple that! I can fully see the desire to remote stream. Being able to AV1 on the fly encode to your local editing station, or even 265, at reduced quality, while still having the full bit depth available for editing sounds divine.
- KaiserPro 2y agoEx VFX person here. It was quite common to have remote desktop cards on high end machines so that you could hide them away somewhere quiet. The edit stations/Flame/Baselite machines all hada fucktonne of 15k sas drives in them, so were really noisy. You couldn't invite a director to see what you were doing, when all you can hear is disk/fan whine. They were quite expensive because they needed to be able to encode and send 2k video in decent bitdepth (ie not 420, but 444), and low latency. Worse still they needed to be calibrateable so that you could make sure that the colour you saw was the colour on the other end. Alas, I can't remember what they are called, thankfully, because they are twats to manage.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoDid y'all run the remote desktop over specific networks?
- KaiserPro 2y agofor VFX, disney/marvel/fox/sony required that the entire network be air gapped, with really stringent rules on USB, data tracking and interchange. All internet access had to be done via RDP with copy/paste blocked. Had sony bothered to follow it's own rules it wouldn't have been hacked and had all its data leaked in 2014..... But to answer the question, we had a shit tonne of networking, so as far as I'm aware it was just on the vanilla network. Might have been a seperate VLAN though.
- mulmen 2y agoWhy can’t you just run a longer cable into a temperature/noise controlled room nearby?
- walrus01 2y agoBased on the comment of 15k spinning drives this must have been quite some time ago, but there's very definite reach length limits on DVI and displayport cables. Let's say this was in 2007 and the maximum state of the art was a dual link DVI 2560x1600 display, you can't extend that in any practical way beyond about 15 feet. Extending USB keyboard and mouse by comparison is trivial. Unless all of the desks and workstations were set up directly on one side of an acoustic barrier wall, a hard problem to solve.
- jmull 2y agoI've been working this way for a long time. Not video editing, but it's the same principle -- I want to be over here (with my monitor, keyboard and mouse) but the large, complex, performance-sensitive environment I need to use is over there. Jump is excellent, BTW. The article seems confused though. They say they are confused if Macs are being used to edit the show, but since the editors are remoting from one Mac to another it seems unambiguous. The flavor of both the local machine and remote machine makes a difference. The OS of the machine you're remoting to makes the biggest difference, but since different OS's have their own ways of handling input devices, the local machine's OS is significant too. Every combo has its quirks, but I find Mac to Mac over Jump to be good.
- crimsontech 2y agoI really want to find a good solution for this. I used to use low powered devices like Intel NUCs but ended up with a bunch of them so my employer bought me a workstation, it makes so much noise in my office that I barely turn it on so I'm not getting good use of it. I think some kind of KVM over IP solution would probably be what I need so I can put the workstation in another room.
- jmull 2y agoI consider KVM over IP to be one form of remoting. It hasn't worked as well as Windows RDP or Jump's "fluid" though (for my purposes). The problem has been the video -- it's too high bandwidth, so you end up making tradeoffs (resolution, compression artifacts, latency, refresh rate) and I couldn't really find something that would work for me. RDP works at a higher level of abstraction than "a video signal" so can be a lot more efficient for the "typical desktop computing" that I need. I don't know how the fluid protocol works, but it must use a higher abstraction as well. The beauty of kvm over ip, though, is that it can work without any software whatsoever being installed on the client. You plug in a usb and video cable and from the client's perspective, it's the same as if you directly plugged in a mouse, keyboard and monitor. But if you can install software on the client (or enable the existing software, as in the case of Windows RDP), you can typically do better.
- ricardobeat 2y ago> These editors aren't working on Macs Isn't the editing software on Macs? Can't see what point is being made here.
- moefh 2y agoI have absolutely no experience with video editing, so I can't say if it's good or not, but the point the article is making is very clear: Put another way, if Stiller's team was building this for Amazon or Netflix, would that be a Mac Mini on Richman’s desk, or an HP or Lenovo box? Why even use a Mac in this editing process at all, when other companies offer access to better GPUs anyway? [...] Sure, there's an Apple logo in the top-left corner (two, actually), but it feels superfluous, knowing that the software isn’t directly on the machine and it [could] just as easily be running on a Windows or Linux box a thousand miles away. There are way more efficient ways to do this, and Apple doesn't offer them. Instead it relies on cloud providers like MacStadium, or localized IT teams, to work around their convoluted rules around VMs. So the client is irrelevant (it's just a terminal), and a non-Apple server would be a better option. (Again, I have no idea if any of this is actually true.) The point of the article, and the full quote, is "These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them".
- ricardobeat 2y agoThe point being ignored is that the editing software is also running on Macs [1]. The local and remote machines are both Macs. To the general public, and the purpose of their story, the fact that you could replace the local one with any dumb client is irrelevant [2]. [1] I don't know about the software they're using in particular (Avid?), but there is a chance the Macs are actually faster than what you can currently get from PCs regardless of GPU - nothing atm matches the bandwidth you can get from Apple Silicon, ProRes hardware encoders, power consumption, noise [2] it's not even actually irrelevant as the overall experience of owning a Mac, outside of the remote desktop client, will be substantially different.
- moefh 2y agoOne more time, I'm not arguing for the article's point -- as I wrote, I have absolutely no experience with video editing, so I have no idea what are the demands regarding hardware/software. I was simply clarifying "what's the point of the article". Your quote fragment ("These editors aren't working on Macs") makes it look like the article is saying something it's obviously not (as it's clear from the very next sentence).
- kittikitti 2y agoI do this all the time and get laughed at. I try to explain the exact same reasons but no one pays attention. I guess I just needed the Big Tech gatekeepers to tell the sheep that it works. Among sheep, it's not about the message but the messenger.
- bitwize 2y agoI think Apple and Microsoft are both prepping us for a future in which our computers are, mostly, mere terminals for their host of cloud services, rather than personal computing devices. This may be a test run/demonstration of whether and how a highly interactive, compute-intensive task like video editing can be performed under such a paradigm.
- crooked-v 2y agoIf anything Apple's gone in exactly the opposite direction, given how much effort they've put into having photo processing, Siri, etc happen locally on specialized hardware. Even stuff like their autocomplete is now using invisible-to-the-end-user LLMs running on local hardware.
- afro88 2y agoThe linked promotional materials [0] say that they remote into a mac mini running Avid. > he works on iMac, which remotes into a separate Mac mini that runs Avid So the conjecture from the article that the mac mini isn't powerful enough is false > In other words, little of the horsepower being used in this editing process is actually coming from the Mac Mini on this guy’s desk. Instead, it’s being driven by another Mac on the other side of a speedy internet connection And based on other comments here, this is a pretty common way to do things. Why the sensationalism? [0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/03/how-the-mind-splitting-world-of-severance-comes-together-on-mac/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/03/how-the-mind-splittin...
- creatonez 2y ago> So the conjecture from the article that the mac mini isn't powerful enough is false Not what the article says... and that doesn't follow anyways. The remote experience was terrible and the non-remote experience wasn't shown at all. How fast the Mac Mini theoretically is doesn't matter at all once you have such an insane bottleneck. > And based on other comments here, this is a pretty common way to do things. And? The industry is making a mistake by knee-capping its editors. It's going into seconds-per-frame territory in the video, it's as close to unusable as you can get. The article seemed to definitively prove its case that someone desperately needs to step back and look at what the requirements for these editors actually are, rather than ramming conflicting demands into each other to appease the anti-piracy insurance mobsters.
- abalone 2y ago> "In other words, little of the horsepower being used in this editing process is actually coming from the Mac Mini on this guy’s desk... I’m not entirely sure we were supposed to see that, but there it is. Oops." Sounds like this author didn't watch the whole video. They are completely open about the fact that the editing team collaborated through remoting. At 5:20 an editor specifically says they "remoted into the Mac mini." The second half of the post raises an arguably good question about the need for fancy Macs when cloud-based workflows only require glorified terminals. But that too may misplaced here -- it's entirely possible that the team members each do local editing work and then host their own collaboration sessions.
- derefr 2y agoKind of funny to me that they have to go so "thin client" with this. You'd think there'd be some kind of "mipmap gateway" component to network-aware video editors, that incrementally re-renders scrub-quality and preview-quality renders of the timeline as the client tells it about project changes, and then streams those rendered changes back down the pipe to the client, proactively, into a local cache — without the client ever needing to (or even being allowed to!) hold the raw assets. Then the local "fat client" editing UI could be snappy at pretty much all times — except for just after modifying the timeline, when it'd have to flush (some variable amount of) the preview cache. (And even then, the controls would still respond; just the preview and timeline-thumbnails would jitter, until the [active part of the] re-cache finished.) Would this enable piracy? No! Who's going to want to release a 480p rip of a TV episode at this point? (And 480ps is all you need, for a functional live preview, when lining up ADB or B-roll or whatever else. Anything needing closer examination — VFX, say — could be rendered and sent by the gateway "on demand", as stills [on play-head stop] or as short clips [on first play after range-selection].) (It would enable leaks... but so does RDP, if you combine it with local video-capture software. So that's nothing new.)
- krupan 2y agoHe's saying that Apple stuff is hard for IT people to configure, customize, and virtualize, but isn't Apple's whole selling point that you don't need to be an IT person to use their products? It's a different market. I think that's why a lot of tech companies now give their employees Apple laptops (they are easy for employees to self-support) but use everything but Apple in the data centers.
- danhau 2y agoThe issue is: how well does Apple hardware integrate into business networks? Does it integrate with Active Directory?
- alwillis 2y agoUm… macOS has supported Active Directory since at least 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Panther?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Panther?wprov=sfti1
- yapyap 2y agopoor editors, having to work with a magic keyboard
- danpalmer 2y agoA colleague used to work for Apple, outside the US, and described his development environment as SSH’ing into a physical machine in Cupertino and working exclusively in a terminal with 100ms latency, because they weren’t allowed on site machines.
- gorfian_robot 2y agooh for the days of offline datacenters and dumb terminals.
- demarq 2y ago> If you want to run a Mac in the cloud, it has to be a full machine in most cases. If cloud companies have the opportunity they will divide the resources of that Mac into 30 vms and then meter access to the point where it would have been cheaper to go out and acquire the hardware yourself. Unpopular opinion, but Apple should stick to its guns and maybe create a physical Mac rack server with legal and technical restrictions on maximum tenancy. Otherwise what is the point of doing it on a mac?
- saagarjha 2y ago> If cloud companies have the opportunity they will divide the resources of that Mac into 30 vms and then meter access to the point where it would have been cheaper to go out and acquire the hardware yourself. That’s…how cloud computing is supposed to work? You pay them a premium to set this up. The fact that this isn’t possible is why everyone is annoyed.
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- matt3210 2y agoIt’s actually about having only one seat license and everyone remotes in to use it.
- londons_explore 2y agoDoing video editing full-time over remote desktop must be painful. Perhaps a 20% productivity hit from that decision alone? Kinda surprised professional video editing software hasn't been designed with this exact use case in mind - ie. A worker running local software doing editing, but then a remote server with tens of Tbytes of storage and high power GPU's. The software would do standard definition and basic rendering fast locally, and simultaneously request the 8k data be rendered remotely and downloaded so a full fidelity preview can be seen after a few seconds.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoWhy? Storage is cheap, and desktop computers have plenty of power to edit. Why on earth would you want to try to stream all of this shit over the Internet?
- londons_explore 2y agoRemote workers tend to have/want laptops, and you just can't fit all the raw footage for a film on a couple of tb SSD... Not would you want to, because one untrustworthy employee could leak all the footage.
- anonfordays 2y agoWe've gone full circle! Thin clients are back baby!
- sluongng 2y agoI think this is a common practice by now. Here is a talk from Netflix about cloud workspace for their artists https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-workstations-reinvent22/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-workst...
- hnlmorg 2y agoI’ve worked in VFX shops and it is indeed very common practice.
- hk1337 2y agoI kind of think the 80TB of video files might have contributed to that? Maybe it was easier to use the jump desktop to do it on another computer than it would have been to copy and pass around the video files?
- omershapira 2y agoMeta: If I had to rank software features of an NLE when I was employed as an editor, key-to-photon (or click-to-sample, etc) latency would rank #1, far outpacing all other concerns. It's fundamental to the rhythm feel of the result, and prevents fatigue. Avid bent over backwards to optimize for that in their software. I can't imagine cloud/remote editing being a good artist tool.
- jpalomaki 2y agoTwo "Remote Desktop" tools mentioned in the article 1)Jump desktop 2)Parsec. [1] https://www.jumpdesktop.com https://www.jumpdesktop.com [2] https://parsec.app https://parsec.app