If you’re freelance, are you using you own hardware or do you remote into a system at a facility?
- I use my own hardware
- I remote into facilities less than 50% of my jobs
- I remote into facilities more than 50% of my jobs
0 voters
2 Likes
I was 50/50 for most of last year, half the jobs on my gear, half on theirs.
Now I’m on a long term thing using their gear (they even sent me a wacom!) so i clicked “more than 50% remote in.
2 Likes
It’s messy.
I sometimes use my own Flame locally and just send files back and forth via Aspera / Massive / WeTransfer whatever.
I sometimes use my own Flame locally and have company supplied networking device.
I sometimes use my own Flame and access someone else’s shared storage via some Dropbox-esque syncing situation like cloud storage or Nextcloud or Owncloud or something like that.
I sometimes connect to someone else’s Flame via encrypted PCoIP from my Ubuntu machine on a separate vlan.
I sometimes connect to someone else’s Flame via HP Z Remote boost over a VPn from my Ubuntu machine on a separate vlan.
@digitalbanshee why do you ask?
I’ve been mostly working locally and moving files back and forth to main production server at the office via SSHFS, but it’s on a mac pro I brought home from the office back in March 2020. I’ve done a couple of jobs remoting in to the office Linux flames via HP Z Remote boost and that’s been a pretty pleasant experience. I’m still trying to get NDI working so I can use the broadcast monitor when I do that.
Mixed bag, for sure… Own machine vs. remote machine. My license vs. theirs. PCOIP vs Remote Boost…
Heavy NDA vs kinda sorta NDA but ok to send you footage and screen shots via text sometimes
2 Likes
This is the third most “ace_elliott” sentence ever.
I guess it becomes an investment decision at some point. It’s okay to clunk away on a laptop running 4 weeks rental of Flare and saving back to a portable usb drive, whilst the pandemic emergency “just get it done” attitude continues. Long term, I feel clients will expect a much more streamlined experience if we are to remain remote. And this involves tech working properly, fast delivery systems and reliable hardware = money!
I think the bigger companies will continue to push for freelancers to their kit remotely as this means it’s less likely you will invest in your own kit and make a living without them 
.
Personally, I will continue to invest in my own gear and give preference to work that utilises it, I think there is longevity here.
There have been massive advances sharing data, streaming and delivering jobs. NDI has started working well, shared servers are nearly seamless (sometimes!) and digital delivery has been streamlined to the point that you don’t need to be sending TBs of data to a delivery house.
Happy days.
I think it’s not solely based on an investment decision. Every great once in a while I encounter a company who is requesting/requiring the artist to remote in because of either an NDA issue or a workflow reason to have the artist log into their facility. I was just curious how often freelancers were encountering facilities requesting them to remote in vs allowing them to work from home.
Personally, I prefer WFH 
2 Likes
Makes sense. I agree, not just financial. Another point was, I think a lot of WFH (if you are just remoting in) will start to go away as things return to normal (?). Why would a company allow you to do that, if they can as easily say, come into the office?
On the other hand, if you own and operator your own kit, you are probably more valuable to more clients.
I definitely prefer WFH and don’t miss a weekly commute one bit. 
One thing that our company has discovered during the pandemic is that since everyone is remote they can now really easily tap into talent from all over the country/world as easily as they used to for the LA area. So two of our editors are in other time zones, our favorite new Houdini guy lives somewhere i forget in South America, one of our maya generalists moved to Hawaii permanently and we’ve started using a variety of east coast nuke artists, and that’s just the ones I know about. Also at least two people have flat out said they’ll quit before they start commuting every day again.
Combining that with how excited I think the owner is to stop paying to feed all these people, or pay for an office staff and I think that’s the answer for why. He’s probably also looking forward to not buying as many computers/paying for as much software licensing in the future if he can get away with it.
3 Likes
Make that three. Haha.
2 Likes
Yeah, i’ve repeatedly said something along the lines of “I’m totally onboard with coming back to the office for client sessions or anything I really need to be there for.” without specifying so far that the client sessions are the only thing I could see myself really needing to go back in for.
However I think it also remains to be seen if agencies from out of town are going to want to pay for four execs to have a fun little junket to LA if they’ve been getting away with not doing it for a year and half now. Shutters and Sushi Roku aren’t cheap.
Ditto.
Make that four!
Yeah. I certainly don’t miss commuting, but then again, I have a space at home to work from. A surprising few editors, & other creatives that I’ve spoken to (lots of parents in the biz where I live) are actually excited to go back into the office (?!?), which is likely because they’re looking forward to having a space outside of home to work from… Knocking 2.5 hours out of my commute literally makes a 10 hour day feel like 8. Pretty much a no-brainer for me.
To your point @onlycarlyouknow, I feel that attended sessions via zoom/sohonet/evercast/etc have surprisingly been more efficient than not, in that you have a captive audience built in for the most part. It seems I have the attention of my clients more consistently, compared to when they’re on the couch behind me, taking phone calls, shopping, writing e-mails, or gossiping about so-and-so @ the agency…
In the long run, the hardware and remote experience (latency, etc) will only get better, hard to believe that we haven’t been working “pandemic-style” for that long… I do miss hanging out IRL though…
3 Likes
They definitely pay more attention and the whole thing is always much much shorter, which is nice. I don’t think I’ve gotten the streaming session fully figured out yet. Maybe I should try Evercast again. I only used it with everyone’s favorite fruit vendor at the beginning of this at their request and it was super flaky. I feel like Zoom is pretty far from color accurate and that tends to be what I’m doing in a session. We bought a Streambox Chroma X and the first session with that was fantastic, and then every one since has been laggy-ier and laggy-ier. Need a bit of free time to really get is sorted.
1 Like
We were the first customers for Chroma back in 2017. It seemed like a godsend back then. We soon came to realize they were the most unprofessional vendor we’ve ever dealt with. Not shady, but totally disorganized and jokey. We constantly had connection problems and the CTO would have to spend hours at our location trying to tune settings. This led me to find UltraGrid and use it to roll our own in-house solution, essentially for free.
My midwest agency clients are starting to go back out to LA for shoots, for whatever that’s worth. Not sure if they’re gonna be parking themselves in edit suites out there for weeks at a time yet, though.
1 Like
Its November. In Chicago. And its already snowing. So yeah. 
Yeah, that about sums up our experience with them. It’s a bummer, if it was always like that first session or two I’d be singing their praises.
Also part of the reason we went with it is was that it supposedly supported Rec2020 HDR review which their tech support did not seem to even understand wasn’t working. As near as I could tell it maybe supports sending an HDR stream but it’s doing mapping down to SDR? I spent awhile trying to get the guy to understand that while yes, i was seeing the picture it wasn’t correct and gave up.