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Ex 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/F

Ex 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 ago
Did y'all run the remote desktop over specific networks?
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  for 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 ago
Why can’t you just run a longer cable into a temperature/noise controlled room nearby?
- walrus01 2y ago
  Based 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.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > you can't extend that in any practical way beyond about 15 feet For passive cables, that makes sense. But with repeaters, wouldn't you be able to go further? Maybe cable repeaters like that are newer than I imagine.
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable for connecting my PC to my TV. It said it was UltraHD rated, but could never get it to work reliably beyond 1080p.
      - ascagnel_ 2y ago
        You need fiber for that -- I have a pair of them (100' to my desk, 30' to my TV), and they've been rock-solid for 4 years.
        KaiserPro 2y ago
        So the issue was more that dual-link DVI was very rare, and getting hardware to encode/transmute it reliably and at high bit-depth was almost impossible. By about 2014 hardware encoders were good enough to send decent quality video over gigabit.
        magicalhippo 2y ago
        Somehow those didn't show up on my searches, though it was a few years ago. Thanks though, will keep it in mind. These days Steam Link is decent enough for what I wanted, but ya never know.
      - diggan 2y ago
        > I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable I think what I was referring to are repeaters you put between cables, that amplifies the signal. You connect that device between two HDMI cables (say 5m) + connect it to power for it to actually extend the distance the signal can travel. I'm not sure what an active HDMI cable would be, maybe circuitry inside the cable that draws power from the HDMI port?
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  Good question! So there are a couple of options, depending on the hardware. If it kicked out HD-SDI you could just patch the display into the coax in the building and have done with it. But that only worked if you were in the same building and your machine kicked out HD-SDI Most machines either shat out dual-link DVI or worse, some custom shit. Getting a cable that can reliably transport dual-link DVI >10 meters was difficult and expensive. Worse still, it had a habit of dropping back to single link, or some other failure mode that was everso annoying to debug. More over, 10 meters often isn't far enough. Especially if the room had a projector (so might be >5m long throw.) Now, thats the simple case. The hard case is multi-building. Say, you have an operator working in london, and the director in new york, you want to give them the highest quality picture possible. The only way to do that at the time was with one of these cards, or some nasty SDI-hardware h264 transcoder (hugely expensive at the time) I really wish I could remember what they were called. They appear to have fallen out of favour. Now, you'd just use cynesync, as you're laptop can encode video in real time now (https://www.backlight.co/product/cinesync https://www.backlight.co/product/cinesync) Also, rumour has it that the wolverene movie was leaked because a producer got coked up and left an unencypted laptop on a plane, rather than using cynesync to show an edit to someone important. Alas I can't verify that.
  - 7a1c9427 2y ago
    Were they Teradici cards?
    - KaiserPro 2y ago
      YES thats the one! many thanks
  - walrus01 2y ago
    I'd love to hear more stories about coked-up producers in the film industry from 15+ years ago. Having done technical codec work adjacent to some of it in the past, it's a wild business to be in.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    > Say, you have an operator working in london, and the director in new york, you want to give them the highest quality picture possible. This is exactly the insight I was hoping for. Thank you.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  You can, and people do. There are a slew of HDMI extension systems, some that even use ethernet with hardware encoding/decoding. Grandparent commenter hasn't worked in the industry in at least a decade if they're talking about DVI.
  - walrus01 2y ago
    In a modern video editing system it's still a non trivial challenge, because you can't just go using any COTS HDMI extension system, which might be good for 2160p30 at 420 color space, or maybe 2160p60 at 420 color space, but may NOT be capable of 2160p60 at 422 or 444 color space. Or may not function for DCI resolution at 4096x2160. Or anything 8K. There's plenty of HDMI2.0 compliant "video over ethernet cable or fiber things" which are the ordinary COTS products that may not be sufficient for serious video editing needs. People on video editing workstations these days are using higher end monitors that can be trusted to work in 10bit color and to match a certain color space grading. On the other hand it's a lot easier these days to have a relatively quiet video editing workstation that has 8 to 16TB of local, pci-express bus attached NVME storage for work space, and that same workstation can have a not-very-expensive 100GbE NIC in it attached to some large/noisy storage elsewhere.
  - m0dest 2y ago
    These days, if you're just wiring to a single workstation in a nearby next room, 50 meter active optical Thunderbolt 3/4 cables can carry 5K+ DisplayPort video passthrough and data from your USB peripherals. (It's "passthrough" and not "uncompressed" because DisplayPort may use DSC depending on the resolution and frame rate.) US$500 for an optical cable can be a lot cheaper than paying for HDMI extender sender and receiver boxes.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    > some that even use ethernet with hardware encoding/decoding We had those, the problem is that they loose bitdepth. They were also fucking unreliable. We had a lot HDMI extenders and they worked for 1920x1080, and sometimes 2k if you were lucky. we used them for the "prosumer" LCD projectors we had the in the review rooms. They didn't work so well for the massive christie projectors. (I seem to recall they abused 3g-SDI to get resolution)
viraj_shah 2y ago
This is a tangent but what was your journey into VFX?
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  I studied digital media in uni. But I had been using linux since about 1999. I wanted to be a compositor, but failed the rotoscoping test at the company I was working at. So I fell back on my technical skills, and became an infra engineer. I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it. I don't think Generative AI will make entire industries disappear, but rather make people within those industries do more with less. Seeing as you somewhat see what future of the industry is, and assuming you're right, it puts you in a good position to gain the skills you think will be sought after. You have the technical skills too seemingly. Just an idea, I'm not working in either areas so take it with a bit of salt I suppose.
da_chicken 2y ago
This is a pretty common problem with all true workstation level computer systems. It's like taking a rack from a data center and putting it in your office. You've got a dozen or more spindles and fans spinning. I've seen systems with $200,000 worth of RAM in them, but that was back when 256 GB of RAM was $100k. And, yeah, they had 15k SAS drives. If you think servers are expensive, you've not priced workstations. Every time I've seen higher end workstations, the actual workstation itself was always in a separate room, and there's been some kind of remote KVM solution used. The workstation was always very noisy and generated a lot of heat. It's also just... a lot of money to shove under a desk where people kick it all afternoon.
- nativeit 2y ago
  I do I.T. for a small broadcast studio (it's actually a sports venue, but they have their own production and broadcast studio), and it is indeed still very much like this. We have rack-mounted workstations alongside all the servers and networking, with KVMs to the next room where the production is handled. This was all spec'd and built out in 2019.
  - MasterScrat 2y ago
    By KVM, do you mean actual cables for keyboard, video and mouse going from the workstations to the user, or some kind of remote desktop tools?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- jdietrich 2y ago
  A number of manufacturers offer soundproof 19" rack enclosures, but they are heavy, bulky and not especially cheap. https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/24u-ucoustic-soundproof-server-rack-cabinet/ https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/24u-ucoustic-soundproof-s...
  - 2y ago
doctorpangloss 2y ago
Guys c'mon... The desk is set dressed. Nothing in the photos makes any sense. Last of all, Geoffrey Richman isn't doing editing work in Ben Stiller's apartment. > Geoffrey Richman reviews season two finale footage. In his at-home edit bay (not pictured), he works on iMac, which remotes into a separate Mac mini that runs Avid from a post-production facility in Manhattan’s West Village. Yeah. That would be a horrible experience.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  One director had their sofa shipped into the Digital-intermediary room (it had a 2k calibrated digital projector) for 4 months. An artist has got to be comfortable....
mcoliver 2y ago
Probably Miranda. Brings back a lot of memories from the flint/flame/inferno days. I remember buying a tezro for ~150k USD in 2005/6. We also were "gifted" an Inferno around that time which I heard originally cost multiple hundreds of thousands. When it showed up it was the size of a refrigerator and took dual 30A power feeds. Sounded like a jet and didn't last long. Teradici came on the scene and started running everything over IP. Hardware at first (old EVGA pyramids were everywhere) where you had to route the video out into a custom card that then put out the signal via IP. Now it's all software with the leaders being teradici (merged with HP anywhere which came from IBM), nicedcv (Amazon), parsec, and a few others. The big advantage in content production over something like vcn/rdp was color fidelity, local cursor termination, and support for hardware like Wacom tablets. You can even do 7.1 audio and multiple monitors. Turns out when you are an artist having a local like feel is incredibly important. 60fps is 16ms per frame. So even with virtual workstations on AWS you want to deploy them in a region that is relatively close to the end user.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago

Did y'all run the remote desktop over specific networks?

KaiserPro 2y ago
for 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 ago

Why can’t you just run a longer cable into a temperature/noise controlled room nearby?

walrus01 2y ago
Based 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.
- diggan 2y ago
  > you can't extend that in any practical way beyond about 15 feet For passive cables, that makes sense. But with repeaters, wouldn't you be able to go further? Maybe cable repeaters like that are newer than I imagine.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable for connecting my PC to my TV. It said it was UltraHD rated, but could never get it to work reliably beyond 1080p.
    - ascagnel_ 2y ago
      You need fiber for that -- I have a pair of them (100' to my desk, 30' to my TV), and they've been rock-solid for 4 years.
      - KaiserPro 2y ago
        So the issue was more that dual-link DVI was very rare, and getting hardware to encode/transmute it reliably and at high bit-depth was almost impossible. By about 2014 hardware encoders were good enough to send decent quality video over gigabit.
      - magicalhippo 2y ago
        Somehow those didn't show up on my searches, though it was a few years ago. Thanks though, will keep it in mind. These days Steam Link is decent enough for what I wanted, but ya never know.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable I think what I was referring to are repeaters you put between cables, that amplifies the signal. You connect that device between two HDMI cables (say 5m) + connect it to power for it to actually extend the distance the signal can travel. I'm not sure what an active HDMI cable would be, maybe circuitry inside the cable that draws power from the HDMI port?
KaiserPro 2y ago
Good question! So there are a couple of options, depending on the hardware. If it kicked out HD-SDI you could just patch the display into the coax in the building and have done with it. But that only worked if you were in the same building and your machine kicked out HD-SDI Most machines either shat out dual-link DVI or worse, some custom shit. Getting a cable that can reliably transport dual-link DVI >10 meters was difficult and expensive. Worse still, it had a habit of dropping back to single link, or some other failure mode that was everso annoying to debug. More over, 10 meters often isn't far enough. Especially if the room had a projector (so might be >5m long throw.) Now, thats the simple case. The hard case is multi-building. Say, you have an operator working in london, and the director in new york, you want to give them the highest quality picture possible. The only way to do that at the time was with one of these cards, or some nasty SDI-hardware h264 transcoder (hugely expensive at the time) I really wish I could remember what they were called. They appear to have fallen out of favour. Now, you'd just use cynesync, as you're laptop can encode video in real time now (https://www.backlight.co/product/cinesync https://www.backlight.co/product/cinesync) Also, rumour has it that the wolverene movie was leaked because a producer got coked up and left an unencypted laptop on a plane, rather than using cynesync to show an edit to someone important. Alas I can't verify that.
- 7a1c9427 2y ago
  Were they Teradici cards?
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    YES thats the one! many thanks
- walrus01 2y ago
  I'd love to hear more stories about coked-up producers in the film industry from 15+ years ago. Having done technical codec work adjacent to some of it in the past, it's a wild business to be in.
- mulmen 2y ago
  > Say, you have an operator working in london, and the director in new york, you want to give them the highest quality picture possible. This is exactly the insight I was hoping for. Thank you.
KennyBlanken 2y ago
You can, and people do. There are a slew of HDMI extension systems, some that even use ethernet with hardware encoding/decoding. Grandparent commenter hasn't worked in the industry in at least a decade if they're talking about DVI.
- walrus01 2y ago
  In a modern video editing system it's still a non trivial challenge, because you can't just go using any COTS HDMI extension system, which might be good for 2160p30 at 420 color space, or maybe 2160p60 at 420 color space, but may NOT be capable of 2160p60 at 422 or 444 color space. Or may not function for DCI resolution at 4096x2160. Or anything 8K. There's plenty of HDMI2.0 compliant "video over ethernet cable or fiber things" which are the ordinary COTS products that may not be sufficient for serious video editing needs. People on video editing workstations these days are using higher end monitors that can be trusted to work in 10bit color and to match a certain color space grading. On the other hand it's a lot easier these days to have a relatively quiet video editing workstation that has 8 to 16TB of local, pci-express bus attached NVME storage for work space, and that same workstation can have a not-very-expensive 100GbE NIC in it attached to some large/noisy storage elsewhere.
- m0dest 2y ago
  These days, if you're just wiring to a single workstation in a nearby next room, 50 meter active optical Thunderbolt 3/4 cables can carry 5K+ DisplayPort video passthrough and data from your USB peripherals. (It's "passthrough" and not "uncompressed" because DisplayPort may use DSC depending on the resolution and frame rate.) US$500 for an optical cable can be a lot cheaper than paying for HDMI extender sender and receiver boxes.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > some that even use ethernet with hardware encoding/decoding We had those, the problem is that they loose bitdepth. They were also fucking unreliable. We had a lot HDMI extenders and they worked for 1920x1080, and sometimes 2k if you were lucky. we used them for the "prosumer" LCD projectors we had the in the review rooms. They didn't work so well for the massive christie projectors. (I seem to recall they abused 3g-SDI to get resolution)

viraj_shah 2y ago

This is a tangent but what was your journey into VFX?

KaiserPro 2y ago
I studied digital media in uni. But I had been using linux since about 1999. I wanted to be a compositor, but failed the rotoscoping test at the company I was working at. So I fell back on my technical skills, and became an infra engineer. I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it.
- diggan 2y ago
  > I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it. I don't think Generative AI will make entire industries disappear, but rather make people within those industries do more with less. Seeing as you somewhat see what future of the industry is, and assuming you're right, it puts you in a good position to gain the skills you think will be sought after. You have the technical skills too seemingly. Just an idea, I'm not working in either areas so take it with a bit of salt I suppose.

da_chicken 2y ago

This is a pretty common problem with all true workstation level computer systems. It's like taking a rack from a data center and putting it in your office. You've got a dozen or more spindles and fans spinning. I've seen systems with $200,000 worth of RAM in them, but that was back when 256 GB of RAM was $100k. And, yeah, they had 15k SAS drives. If you think servers are expensive, you've not priced workstations. Every time I've seen higher end workstations, the actual workstation itself was always in a separate room, and there's been some kind of remote KVM solution used. The workstation was always very noisy and generated a lot of heat. It's also just... a lot of money to shove under a desk where people kick it all afternoon.

nativeit 2y ago
I do I.T. for a small broadcast studio (it's actually a sports venue, but they have their own production and broadcast studio), and it is indeed still very much like this. We have rack-mounted workstations alongside all the servers and networking, with KVMs to the next room where the production is handled. This was all spec'd and built out in 2019.
- MasterScrat 2y ago
  By KVM, do you mean actual cables for keyboard, video and mouse going from the workstations to the user, or some kind of remote desktop tools?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
jdietrich 2y ago
A number of manufacturers offer soundproof 19" rack enclosures, but they are heavy, bulky and not especially cheap. https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/24u-ucoustic-soundproof-server-rack-cabinet/ https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/24u-ucoustic-soundproof-s...
- 2y ago

doctorpangloss 2y ago

Guys c'mon... The desk is set dressed. Nothing in the photos makes any sense. Last of all, Geoffrey Richman isn't doing editing work in Ben Stiller's apartment. > Geoffrey Richman reviews season two finale footage. In his at-home edit bay (not pictured), he works on iMac, which remotes into a separate Mac mini that runs Avid from a post-production facility in Manhattan’s West Village. Yeah. That would be a horrible experience.

KaiserPro 2y ago
One director had their sofa shipped into the Digital-intermediary room (it had a 2k calibrated digital projector) for 4 months. An artist has got to be comfortable....

mcoliver 2y ago

Probably Miranda. Brings back a lot of memories from the flint/flame/inferno days. I remember buying a tezro for ~150k USD in 2005/6. We also were "gifted" an Inferno around that time which I heard originally cost multiple hundreds of thousands. When it showed up it was the size of a refrigerator and took dual 30A power feeds. Sounded like a jet and didn't last long. Teradici came on the scene and started running everything over IP. Hardware at first (old EVGA pyramids were everywhere) where you had to route the video out into a custom card that then put out the signal via IP. Now it's all software with the leaders being teradici (merged with HP anywhere which came from IBM), nicedcv (Amazon), parsec, and a few others. The big advantage in content production over something like vcn/rdp was color fidelity, local cursor termination, and support for hardware like Wacom tablets. You can even do 7.1 audio and multiple monitors. Turns out when you are an artist having a local like feel is incredibly important. 60fps is 16ms per frame. So even with virtual workstations on AWS you want to deploy them in a region that is relatively close to the end user.