What facilities are allowing artists to remote into their onsite machines to do freelance work? There are a couple newly minted freelancers who can’t afford an at-home setup and are finding it difficult to get work because they need to remote in. I’ve got a small list started but I’d love your input. Thank you!
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It’s been a while since I worked with any of these shops, but from what I know Method has remote-in machines. I believe Assembly in NYC and Parliament in LA are fully remote/cloud. I would imagine most of the other medium to large shops (A52, Psyop, Mill) have some measure of remote machines.
Framestore
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Preymaker
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Fotokem has more than 20 remote machines.
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Carbon, Method, Framestore, The Mill…so many more.
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Ntropic and HouseSpecial too
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We at Rohtau are fully remote, literally, so we love people living where they want to live and working around different time zones, not a problem, no matter how far you are from our servers.
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Did you really find this to be the case? I tried remoting in from Vietnam for a job in London and it didn’t work at all. Was just really laggy. Did it on my own machine in the end.
Well, there is a secret sauce to make it work, we have been putting it all together over the course of a year and we have tested it in real production and yes, it does work very very well.
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Yeah you just have to run /usr/bin/secret/sauce.py for it all to come together, right?
What I’ve found is yes, there are some companies out there that are doing it right. And there are a lot that aren’t. So, blanket statements are difficult in this situation because literally everything matters in this discussion. Anecdotally, if you are in or very near a major international city with major financial markets, you have a better chance at having good experience. If you are in the US near a major city or freight rail line, you have a better chance at having a good experience. But none of that is a guarantee. And there are a lotta studios that haven’t cracked it yet.
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Well I did not expect freight rail lines to come up in this discussion. I’m guessing correlation without causation? Pretty funny.
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A couple years ago I was deep into the history of American infrastructure, and it turns out that railways with their existing right of ways heavily influence the seemingly meandering path of fiber in the U.S.
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I have not tested every single country but our tests and our production work were successful at distances of around 7,000km and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work with New Zealand, the furthest country from London.
But yes, you are right, they need electricity, internet access to the rest of the planet and a minimum connection of 25Mbits down for things to work. If you are in countries that are under embargo, we may not be able to work with them for legal reasons, but technically should work.
I have worked a few time with the mill LA whilst being in Sydney Australia, worked suprisingly well! I think there was a good pipe laid between US and Australia at some point and Sydney is the Hub in oz. but i wasnt on a fast connection at the Sydney end. it was very doable, not speedy but usable!
ILM, Weta, DNEG
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Ok @onlycarlyouknow
Called me out so obligated to respond.
I’ve tried remote workflow at many facilities.
The software versions are workable but they can have noticeable lag which is annoying.
BY FAR the better solution has been with hardware solution given by vendor.
Not sure of details, but a few situations where I’ve had a small hardware box to connect with (think it was an hp rgs box) that was significantly improved.
When I was doing work for Fotokem, the machine had response like it was local. Granted it’s only Venice to Burbank, but still noticeable diff.
There could have been other engineering backbone that was helping this as well, but have never seen a software only solution come close.
A few places I’ve tested w cloud hardware for flame have been the worst results. UI and playback both awful.
Another big positive is when you can get a secondary feed thru an appleTV or similar. This seems to give better playback, since not in sane feed as Ui, and restore broadcast monitor capability.
Colorfront looks to be working on a solution to deliver HDR signal thru similar means which would be very interesting and looking forward to leaning on that.
Cheers-
Andy D
You are right, almost everyone is working remotely to a certain extent now thanks to Covid, but that is not to say is superior in terms of user experience, colour accuracy and temporal stability (codecs are tricky)
The difference is that we are cloud only, and there is a massive difference between working remotely and working exclusively on the cloud (remotely), absolutely mind-bending, even if the experience is not the same, it is a different planet altogether, with different possibilities and sure, different challenges.
seconding this, and I dial into LA from much further away.
my one experience with the cloud was shocking. I moved the whole job to my local mac trashcan and it’s 500MB/s raid to speed things up.
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