Cool.
Alright. Looks like we've got some people coming in. Chris Filiano. Welcome, Chris.
I don't think audio is enabled for anyone, but I do believe you can put questions in the chat, or we'll just hang out. Look. We've got some more folks coming in here.
And for those of you coming in, we're just gonna give everybody a few minutes here to to come in. I know everyone's super busy.
So let's give it a few minutes, and we'll see who comes. I'm Clayton Dutton. I'm joined by my cohost and partner in crime at LucidLink, Steven Nigelski.
Hey. You're welcome. More formal introductions in a minute. So and if you get a chance or if you feel inclined, put, drop in the chat where you're from. It's always nice to see what locations people are. We get surprised quite often.
You've got a you got Philip here, Doug, Chris, Tony. Right.
Had a good group starting here. The early bird, Sue. But thank you.
Toronto. Alright. Doug's from Toronto. I'm in New York myself, Steven.
Yeah. And I'm coming in from, Arizona.
Tony, Vancouver, Canada. Very well represented today.
DMV, Philip. Yeah. I'm a Maryland boy myself. So So we'll give everybody a few more minutes, see who else come manages to come in.
Alright. Get kicked off here in a few minutes.
Alright. Lots of people jumping in here.
Welcome, Jeff.
I think we could probably go ahead and get started with some introductions here.
Welcome, everyone, for the to the boost productivity for your remote video team webinar today. This is our magic hour.
Here at LucidLink, we really are passionate about, you know, just sharing not not only about our company, but also, you know, Steve and I, as you'll find out, we both come from postproduction backgrounds as well at production. So very passionate about sharing some really cool opportunities.
Additionally, we know how pinched everyone's getting out there from a budgetary perspective. Right? There's a lot of disruption in our industry and, in fact, the world right now. So how do you actually do things more efficiently?
We all hear do more with less, and we all are, yeah, we all can pretty much guarantee budgets will continue to be pressured next year. So Steven and I hope today to share some really interesting ways to actually do more with less. Right? How do you actually do these things?
Good news is none of it's science fair, none of it's vaporware.
Well, maybe a tiny little portions of prototype, which we'll talk about.
But before we get into the deep stuff, my name is Clayton Dutton. I was a video editor for many years. I had the honor of working at Discovery Channel for a lot of those years, seventeen of them to be precise. Spent a lot of the time, the majority of my time, though, over the broadcast postproduction and, in fact, managing the global media supply chain from an operations perspective. So really used to insane volumes, a thousand different ways of doing things across the globe, and that kind of volume. So when I found out that LucidLink actually did provide you with the opportunity today to work without downloading large datasets, well, quite frankly, I couldn't get here quick enough, and I'm just honored to be a part of LucidLink now. Steven, over to you.
Yeah. Thanks, Clayton. So, yeah, like he said, similarly, my background is in is in postproduction. I came from, more of a corporate ad agency environment, which has its own whole set of, you know, time frames and deadlines and pressures and need you know, desires to be efficient and, deliver a lot of, content quickly.
So, same kind of motivation. You know? You really, you know, I always stro strives to find ways to make things faster but still maintain the quality, and that's something that we, both get to do in our jobs today is help other other people, other creatives like you, try to meet those demands as well. So happy to do this webinar with you, and we'll explore some options today.
And real quick, Chris, thank you for the we already had a question. When will this webinar be available to view on demand? Great question, Chris. Our marketing team's gonna handle that for us. Typically, it's a day or two, if that helps.
So, yeah, should be in the next day or two, we can, have something up for everybody to look at on demand.
Alright. So, Steven, if you'll look at the bottom of our bar here too, we have a q and a section, that has a number two next to it. So, I have gone ahead and I'll I'll clear that queue real quick. But when I'm on, maybe take a look at that, and I'll do the same.
And we'll kind of what what we're gonna try to do is address everybody's questions along the way. But if we don't, don't worry. We're gonna have a ton of time at the end for q and a. Alright?
So what we're actually gonna try to do today is really take you through a start to finish workflow, right, from ingest tech slash assistant editor to the editor and creator, all the way to the producer and the creative or the creative director review and approval type of phase, and then the outward facing last final piece, the part we all love when we get paid, delivering to our clients. Right?
So I'm gonna first start sharing my screen, and then we can jump in and start talking. Alright. So let me do this, and let me share.
And great. We will do that. Okay. Can everybody see my screen, Steven? Can you see my my desktop here?
You sure can. Cool.
Cool. Well, just in case we have anyone that's not super familiar with LucidLink, you know, I think, Steven, we didn't really talk about that, but we should probably spend a minute, or just a quick second explaining what LucidLink is. And, really, LucidLink is the collaborative everywhere instantly stored solution. We effectively take your s three cloud object storage, and we operationalize it. And what I mean by that is we make it look, act, and feel exactly like a local SSD drive.
This is actually a cloud object storage bucket in the IBM data center in Dallas, Texas. I'm in New York. Steven and I could both work off this, and we'll show you, examples of that in real time.
But the first thing I'm gonna do in this remember, we're gonna we're gonna get some content into ingest, and we have we wanna do a couple things. So, Steven, I'm gonna jump over first into Frame. Io. I did forget to mention, I was actually the founding solutions engineer at Frame.
Io, and I came to LucidLink directly from Frame. Io. So I have been a little naughty. I do have a little prototype that I built that isn't productized yet, but we're gonna be demonstrating it just to have some fun.
But everything we show you today can be done without that as well. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just go in here and quick grab a quick clip of, you know, us waving hello to each other or something silly like that. And, you know, at that point, Frame. Io is gonna take over, and Frame.
Io acts automatically generates all these folders. But what I want to have happen is that we also get some content into Premiere for Steven because Steven's actually gonna I'm gonna want him to cut some of these pieces into his cut, so that we can later, export what the client needs as far as deliverable. Now I'm shooting myself here. Right?
I'm doing a couple clips. Nothing major. Just imagine the same kind of flow on set, right, either with an iPhone or with a red or a black magic, whatever it is that you might wanna use. I would encourage you to look at Frame.
Io's website to get the details of what integrates with camera to cloud. That's not really the point of our part today. I'm now gonna hand over to Steven, though, because as an ingest tech, you know, he's gonna have to do some work. So, Steven, hand over to you.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Nick. Just piggybacking off of what you were just talking about, we were just at Adobe Max the last three days, in Miami, and we were demonstrating in our booth a very similar kind of workflow where we had a a videographer, wandering around the show floor, shooting content that was coming in through Clayton's camera to cloud integration, pulling it automatically into LucidLink, and then, he we had an editor in on the show floor and another one in LA, like, cutting social media content and posting it throughout the day. So we we had this operationalized, you know, in an actual environment this very week. So I'll go ahead and share my screen. Just thought I'd share that because it's it was a very cool, workflow and a big hit at the show.
Alright. So let me show what I'm going look looking at here. This is the same file space that Clayton was connected to. You can see he was, dropping those shots, and you saw them on his screen popping up within the Frame.
Io interface, what was going on behind the scenes, which is probably too in detail to go into, the details of it for this webinar. But, basically, those those files are getting pulled in from from, Frame. Io and drop into a certain location within the file space. So what I like to do and one of the things that we talk about to tie back into the topic of our webinar today is look for ways to be efficient, and that is, something you know, there's a couple of things about proxy workflows that are great.
One is that, it really can help your editors down the road. We'll talk about the editor persona in a minute and how proxies help that person do their job more efficiently.
But the pain point, typically, that I've encountered, I think, Clayton, you'd probably agree, is people hate to have to make the proxies. It feels like an extra step. It's like, oh, I don't want I'm I've got enough on my plate. I don't wanna have to deal with proxies.
But we'll just show you something pretty cool. If you just set this up, you can stop thinking about having to make the proxies yourself. So Media Encoder, for those of you in the in the premier universe, and I think, that's gonna be everyone tuning in today, because that's how we build this seminar. But people are probably used to using Media Encoder in the way where you have your queue, and you have assets that you drop in there, and they render on your local machine.
What some of you may or may not know is there's another option called watch folders.
And within the Media Encoder UI, you can basically designate a watch folder that says, hey. Anything that hits this folder, do something to it. And so you're probably starting to connect the dots already, but what I'm gonna do is just hit the plus button. I'm gonna navigate into prod as the name of the file space that we're working in here today. I'm gonna go into the location frame. Io.
Yeah. Two point o. It's fairly deep within this UI, but that's Yeah.
That it's that's my fault because I buried it in there very deeply.
And we've got some assets coming over now, Steven. So just go ahead and and do the rest of it, and those will be in just momentarily.
Perfect. And so once I set the destination or the or the source location for the watch folder, then I have the options of choosing the format. And in this case, I went ahead and picked, h two sixty four and then just a a high quality seven twenty p because I'm for my workflow, that's gonna be a good proxy format. So once I have this designated, I'm just gonna go back over and monitor in macOS Finder.
And what we're gonna see is any content that anyone on the team because remember, because your LucidLink Filespace is available to everybody in your team no matter where they are, if you've got any, you know, director of photographers, videographers, anything like that, they have access to this folder where they can upload content either through camera to cloud or or just a simple drag and drop from your memory card into the file space off a laptop.
However they're getting the content into that folder, Media Encoder is just gonna watch for it.
In this case have you shot anything new yet, Clayton?
I'm just I did.
But I think the, right now, I think the Frame. Io, API is a little bit intermittent. So let's just go ahead, and we'll just go ahead and put some other content in manually. Yeah.
Perfect. Yeah. So, like like I was starting to say, you can any way that you get content into that folder, like, you just drop something called fast drive dot m p four. You can see on my screen. Mhmm. And you'll see kinda behind that here on on the right bottom right corner, it pulls every maybe thirty seconds or so.
So in a minute, you'll see there.
Goes.
Touch anything. Right? My Media Encoder installation picked that up, and and it's gonna start doing something. And see what it what it started to do right away is it created two subfolders.
In one spot, it it it tucked away the source, which was that original fast drive that had before, and the output is all well, it turns out my output format was also in before, but this is a newly transcoded file. You can see it was just done today. My local time is ten AM because I'm based in a Pacific time zone currently.
And so that was something that happened automatically.
Now, of course, I'm doing this on my laptop that I'm working from, but imagine if you, you know, are constantly bringing in fresh media.
You could do the same kind of thing on a really beefy workstation. Maybe it's in your studio or your office. It could also just as easily be a VM.
Remember, we say when you have content in LucidLink, it's already everywhere. So you can have a machine anywhere in the world on a, you know, high speed connection with the VM doing that same thing, running Media Encoder, just watching a source folder. And so, this kinda takes that extra, legwork out of making the proxies. And then once you once you have them, then it's super easy to deploy. Now we'll get more into that. I wanna get into the editor side of this conversation.
And, everyone, just for your edification, you're starting to see those assets that I shot earlier come in. I love Frame. Io. They're doing a lot of work. They just released a major version, but you can see the API is only now picking up those webhooks. So we're picking those up, and we're delivering the data right into LucidLink.
I love that. I don't have to create a folder. I don't have to drag and drop assets. Like, I I like to move things automatically.
Yeah. Steven, so I'm gonna grab that from you then, and I'm actually gonna go in and, I'm gonna look at it in Premiere if that's okay. And then if I like it, I'm actually going to, do something interesting on I'm gonna actually approve it, and then it might I guess I'm gonna take everybody through the render final render then. Right? Is that right?
Yeah.
Alright. So let's go to LucidLink. Steven, just close the project. I'm gonna open it and see if we're good to go. And that's our Mac one opener project that we're working on. Is that right, Steven?
Yeah. That's one of them. Yeah. Yeah. That has the different footage that we loaded previously, not not the stuff we just shot. But yeah.
What's the shot stuff we just shot? Where is that at?
That, we'd have to bring in. We could create a new project.
Okay. That's fine. No. I I just didn't know that you that's right. You you hadn't cut it in.
Alright. Great. So as you could see, I have my sequence loaded. Again, we're working in Adobe productions here.
I can start to play through. I could see everything that Steven sees. And in fact, if he'd made a change right before I opened it, that change would be live too. Notice there's only one project file for each of the ones we've done, and all of us and Adobe is handling creating a PR lock file, and that really keeps everyone from all that version controls handled outside of us.
Right? We don't have to count the times we've typed the word final at the end of a sequence. Right? And, yes, unfortunately, in my career go ahead.
Upper left corner of the screen, if you see that within the premier production environment, so a different user besides Clayton has Mac two final open, and so that one has got the little red padlock on it.
So that's another mechanism for, you know, highlighting ways to collaborate with multiple users. You can have a more complex structure, and then and Premiere handles all that locking through the productions environment.
That's right. So, Steven, let's I I just I've gone through here. I like it. In fact, I'll even go into Frame. Io if I need to and mark something approved.
That's fine just so we're all tight on the integrations everywhere. We're looking good. I think I am clear now to do my final piece as the editor. Yep. Correct?
Yeah. Absolutely.
Alright. Well, I've just hit save. I'm actually gonna go ahead and close it because I don't really need Premiere open anyway.
Now I need to open up my production drive. You know? And what I need to do actually now is go and correct me if I'm wrong here, Steven. I need to go to my productions, and then I'm gonna drop my actual project file. Correct?
And Let's let's do let's do something even even crazier.
How about you you set up your watch folder. Because here's here's something kinda cool.
There you go. That's right.
Let's do that. Watching it. If, not only can Media Encoder do, watch folders for actual files, like like, MOBs and befores and accept stuff like that, you can actually do it with project files as well. So so what Clayton's gonna do is he's got a watch folder you see on his screen set up for, a certain location.
And so now what I'm gonna do, I'll go ahead and quit Media Encoder on my on my machine. And, of course, remember, we're doing this just kind of back and forth on each other's laptops. But, again, probably the more, like, the way you do it for real beta, like, designate some heavy workstation somewhere that's got good bandwidth, and then you you would do it that way. But so I'll I'll go so we've got his screen going there. I'll go ahead and start sharing as well once I open up the project that he was just in. Alright.
Yep. So once you're done and, everyone, while Steven's doing that, one of the banes of my existence is QC failures right before air when I was at Discovery. Happened constantly. And it's right before air. You don't have time to send it out of house to fix it, so you pay to fix it. We hire creatives for their creative talent.
The technical side of the craft is tough.
And you by showing by doing what we're showing you here, you can set up the render preset however your deliverable needs it to be and take that burden off of your creatives. They'll love you for it, and you'll love them for it because you're gonna get much better technical QC failure rates. Right? So go ahead.
Yeah. Absolutely. So here you know? And you saw, by the way, we this wasn't really the focus of it, but Clayton had this project open, what, thirty seconds ago.
He's in New York. I'm in Arizona. I just opened the same project, and, you know, maybe I'm still editing. I'll I'll make some kind of adjustment here.
I'll bring that down. I'll put it back just so there's no gap in the timeline. But alright. Magic magic editing.
It looks wonderful.
When I'm done with that, again, obviously, I could render it on my local workstation. I could I could do you know, kick it out through a meeting encoder on my local workstation, do regular renders, whatever I wanna do. But what that's gonna do is tie up my machine for the next however many minutes.
And, of course, my bandwidth is is used in that process as well. So but what would what if you would rather have your editor keep editing or move on to the next project and edit something else? That's what I'm gonna gonna show you here. So instead of me rendering locally, I'm gonna do save a copy.
K. Now I'm gonna navigate into the folder structure. This is a folder that that Clayton and I predesignated as our watch folder, so it's called encode me now. I'm just gonna save a copy of my Premiere Pro project file into that folder.
Now let's switch back to his screen.
I'll go ahead and I'll stop sharing.
Thanks, Steven. I think I took it over from you anyway, didn't I, or did I not?
Yours is yep. There we go.
As you can see, everyone, that project file that Steven dropped into my watch folder triggered off the render in the background. Again, I decide the render preset. I take the guesswork out of my creative's hands. I love my creatives. I was an editor for many, many years, but I'm old enough to have the benefit of being starting my nonlinear career having done some linear editing training too. So I do have the technical background.
Most new editors do not, nor should they necessarily acquire it. I'd like to because I'm a geek, but not everyone's like that. And so we are protecting our creatives.
More importantly, we're protecting our timelines.
And once this is done, again, because LucidLink is a unified file system, It does not matter whether my creatives are on Mac, Windows, or Linux. I don't care. They're gonna get a LucidLink drive that they can access in the same way no matter what. Okay?
Go great. And I I tell Steven all the time and lots of my friends, I like to remove the lighters from people's hands before the fire start. So we've taken the calls on Friday night saying, hey. We've got this really high end, VFX editor, but he's bringing a Linux box. Can we handle that?
That can lock you up. With LucidLink, you just go.
But now I could also add my clients. I could bring a client into the the platform by just going into my control panel and adding them in. Now, Steven, I'll have you take us through that because I'm not actually an admin on this particular file space, then that's fine. Or, actually, Steven's gonna make me an admin real quick in the background.
So if you'll notice before I switch over, I only have two headers here. Well, watch what happens in the background. But while he's doing that, I like to actually go one step further and have my deliverables here, my stems, my final version, all my subtitles and closed captions, my textless version that I can send out for my oh, I've been promoted to administrator. Look at that.
I just got a message from Lucid Lake on the desktop. You know, I've never actually seen that, Steven. That was pretty cool. Have you seen that?
I have. That's nice.
Let's but let's go back. And now when I open my control panel, you're gonna see that I have a myriad of other settings here. I can add users. I can do anything I need to to to enhance or, in fact, retract access from someone.
In fact, if I decided I wanted to go ahead and and do some nefarious things, Steven, I don't know from the background if you can remove the two accesses that you just gave me because I think let's talk about that real quick. Right? Once an editor is done, you should not have access to all this stuff that I currently have access to. And you can see Steven can actually change my access in real time. So all those folders just disappeared. My admin privileges have been revoked, and now I am back to normal access. In fact, Steven could take any subset of this away if he needed to.
And any of you out there, well, what would happen, Steven? What happens to the data that I have locally cached?
Yeah. So everything we haven't really talked about this yet within this webinar, but everything that happens within a LucidLink Filespace is protected by what we call our zero knowledge encryption model. And so that means anything you put into the Filespace, is encrypted before it even leaves your system. It's gonna be encrypted in flight, encrypted in the cloud. And even if I have something cached and and partially cached or fully cached in my system, all of the individual data blocks are encrypted as well. So as soon as my permission or, in this case, as soon as Clayton's permission was revoked to a certain folder, he no longer can see it, and he has no access to any of that data.
However, if if it was cached and I returned his access, he would then, again, be able to to access that data. So it's immediate Right. Grinding and revoking of access globally, which, again, is one of the huge that's part I mean, we're kinda focusing on, like, efficiency from a a media workflow standpoint, but that's just efficiency no matter what you're doing because you just have immediate access from anywhere.
Yeah. Totally. And, you know, we are we, you know, we we have we go through as a reminder to everyone, unlike Dropbox or drop or Box or Google Drive, all great solutions at what they do, but they're duplicating your data every time. If you if I'm an editor and I create something locally, that's one copy. I upload to one of those solutions, that's two. Steven and four other people collaborating with me, that's seven copies of discrete copies of my data that I can't control.
In that example with LucidLink, there's one copy.
You create it on LucidLink. It stays there, and no one ever brings the full file object down. This is the only space we ever use on your computer. This can be set as large as ten terabytes.
So you wanna have good fat caches. Right? We wanna be able to go to the Internet for the data as infrequently as we need to. Right?
Anytime you need to go to the Internet to grab data, there's latency involved. Right? We like to mitigate latency. And one of my favorite ways Steven, I don't know if you have that or still have the the project open, but you might wanna take us a little bit through the panel as well.
That might be if I don't I I know I didn't prepare you. So if you're not ready, I can do it. It's fine.
I I didn't close it, so I can jump right into that.
Beautiful.
In fact, one of the things that that cool thing is kinda finishing off that previous thought of what we were just talking about is if if I, as an editor, needed to move on to the next edit, I could have just quit Premiere and switched over to After Effects and did something there, or I could have opened a completely different Premiere project, continued working, again, being productive, being efficient, and let that remote machine handle my render. I because I didn't actually need to do that, I I left from Premier open.
But so circling back to the caching part. You know, as Clayton was describing, you designate a certain amount of cache space on your machine. And what's really important to note is that is a block level cache. So I think we've talked about this a little bit on the webinar, but maybe not spelled it out completely.
When you use LucidLink, it's a block level structure, so you don't need entire files to be pushed and pulled in order to access them.
And that's what allows you to be able to play back directly from the cloud. So when, you grant access to a project and you hire a new freelance editor because you're getting close to a deadline, you grant them access to it could be, like, five terabytes of content. They can immediately, like, within seconds, start working from that project. They do not need to download and wait wait for it or have a hard drive big enough to store all of that.
And so one of the ways that you can kind of augment that caching workflow, the default way is that if I just start playing a file, like, I here, I'll start playing through.
This, video is about making smoothies. So she's gonna be adding ingredients and stuff like that. And as we do that, as I play it, I'll pause now. That section I just played, the blocks for that section were coming down from the cloud on demand.
Now that's a great way to work. And if you can get away with working that way, if your bandwidth is fast enough to handle the the media type you're playing, that's my favorite way to use LucidLink because it feels like you have the biggest hard drive in the world. Right? It's like I I have my laptop, but it could have a petabyte hard drive on it because everything just comes down from the cloud as you need it.
And that's kind of the dream. Right? But there are situations where maybe I'm working with, footage that's just way too hybrid. Right?
Like, maybe I've got content that's coming in, like, Open Gate ARRI RAW, or I'm doing VFX stuff, and I've got EXRs coming in. Or or maybe I'm just working with a a fairly modest, like, four hundred megabit per second codec, but I'm traveling, And who knows what kind of hotel Wi Fi I'm gonna be encountering? So for all of those situations where my bandwidth might not be strong enough to play back the kind of media I'm working with, we introduced, you know, two different ways to cache. So instead of that automatic way, we have a proactive way called pinning.
So pinning can be done in a couple ways. I can either do it on the desktop level where I just navigate to a folder, right click on it, and and I've got this option to pin.
Like that, I'll get this little pop up window that says you're about to pin certain amount of data. I'll just hit cancel because this was just a demonstration. But when you're working within a premier environment, that can honestly be kind of annoying. If if every time you encounter new media, I've gotta go reveal in finder, jump out, pin it.
So one of our great colleagues, Adam, created this LucidLink panel. And so when I load in the panel and, by the way, you can find the panel, within, the Adobe Creative Cloud. If you look look under plugins and just search for LucidLink, it's free. You just download the plugin.
And what this will do is it will read my timeline. You see? So this this LucidLink panel kind of in the center of my screen by the way, also works the same exact way for After Effects if you use After Effects. So it reads that I've got this open sequence called opener sequence multicam.
It's telling me how much data is in my timeline.
Not only that, it also shows me if I've got any proxies created. In this case, I do have proxies created. I can actually go in here and get a little bit more detail, like open clip view. It's gonna show me the different files that I've got linked in here.
And so it's really useful. You know, if I find that a certain file maybe isn't playing back, you can see one of them is pinned, the other one isn't. If I decide I wanna pin this one as well, I can just click on the three dot menu, and I say pin clip or pin proxy. I'll show you that instead since we haven't done that yet.
So it's just gonna go in the background without me ever leaving Premiere. Right? If you're a Premiere editor, you just wanna stay here. You don't wanna be jumping out and breaking your flow.
This just loads pre proactively loads that into my Lucid cache so I can just keep working, and it's gonna play back perfectly smooth now regardless of, you know, if I have horrible, Internet where I am. You can even be on a hot spot. You know? You can be working in the back seat of a taxi, on your way to a meeting.
You can pull this up with just the minimal amount of Internet, and you can actually be editing four k media or higher.
So that's what the panel does for you. It's a really great, efficiency tool.
Thank you, Steven. In fact, gang, I'll be using this Monday. I'm fly or I'm flying out to Vegas to do something for the IBM Tech Exchange, and I will be tightening up my edit on the way out, leveraging these exact functions. Thirty thousand feet in the air on airplane Wi Fi and full resolution.
So absolutely easy to do. Other thing I wanted to tell everyone is, you know, the stuff we've showed you today, you know, outside of the Frame. Io integration, it's all stuff you own today, likely. You have Creative Cloud.
You have Media Encoder.
Those watch folders are extremely powerful. And, really, it sounds like such a straightforward thing to do, but and it is, but the result is huge. You will move the needle significantly by doing things like this. Right? I love to create proxies when my shooters are dropping their original camera footage into certain folders in LucidLink.
Because, again, removing the lighters from people's hands so they can't start fires. Because you never get called because things have gone wrong on a weekday during business hours. It's always when you don't want the call.
So just remove the problems before they ever even happen.
Another thing with remote use users that we see is, you know, we get asked this all the time. What's the minimum bandwidth connection? The answer is hotspot, actually.
But if you're asking me what's the minimum bandwidth connection to edit seven hundred megabits per second video, the answer is gonna be less than seven hundred. Let's find out. Right? It depends.
Because we don't need we don't use the full file object. We have a cache that kinda slides along the and and only plays what it needs to. So you can get to you can actually get away with pretty ridiculous data rates. There are limits, though.
We're not magic. We don't create bandwidth where it doesn't exist. Right? So that's why we have, low latency features like pinning or high latency, low bandwidth features.
Yeah. And and proxies fit into that same thing. So it just gives you the option. You know, if you make them, if you kinda automate it so they're just always there, then, anytime as an editor finds themselves in a in a because, you know, that's the thing. If you work hybrid or remote, you know, sometimes you find yourself somewhere else where your bandwidth needs change all of a sudden, your bandwidth supply changes.
And then all of a sudden things that used to work don't work as smoothly. And if you've already got the proxies created, you fix that problem in about a half a second by clicking the toggle proxy button. So it's great it's a great option to have that, preset in advance.
And on a billing on a pricing note for everyone, you know, and I'm not gonna get into specific prices. But for everyone's knowledge, once you're over the one terabyte minimum, we charge by the gigabyte, not the terabyte. So, again, we try to be fair.
You know, for those of you who just wanna put a credit card in, it becomes like your water bill or your power bill. You're paying for what you use, essentially. So we hope we've been able to, just to shine the light on some really low hanging fruit. Right?
Some easy things that you all can do. Steven, do you have any, any videos on this on the website anywhere or anything like that? Or are we planning on anything like this coming out? Or or do you know?
We do have a a video that focuses specifically on the distributed rendering, workflow. I'll see if I can find the link here after I get done talking. But, but, yeah, we have that video created where it just kinda walks you through kind of a similar thing to what we were showing here, not only using it for, proxy generation, but also for, you know, dropping in your finished project files. Oh, and I didn't mention, you can do the same thing with After Effects projects.
So if you have a media encoder open and you drop an an AEP file into that watch folder, it will actually run your comp as well. So, really versatile. You know? It's really, really helpful to use.
And remember, everyone, none of that's possible when each of you are working individually from your local hard drive. Right? So there's an ancillary benefit with going cloud first with your data structures. You you have all these distributed opportunities that you haven't had before.
And in fact, if some of you are really advanced users and you get into virtual machine workflows, just install LucidLink on the virtual machine, log it in, make sure it has access to the media you want it to manipulate or the data you want it to manipulate, and away you go.
Can't be understated. Because we look, act, and feel like a local hard drive, we get asked a lot. What if I'm not a premier user? What if I'm using Final Cut, Avid, DaVinci, Cinema four d, Maya, Flame? The answer is all those work. We're just a local hard drive. Microsoft Word works, Excel.
If if it opens files from hard drives, it works with LucidLink, chances are.
So one last thing I kinda wanted to leave with everyone, and I'm I'm gonna invite you to ask any questions you may have while I'm doing this, is that I wanted to kinda posted in the chat.
Yeah. Sorry.
Oh, good. Okay. Great. We'll grab that in a second. Before I do, everyone, if you wanted to, just go to lucid link dot com and click start your free trial if you're not a customer.
We give you a fully featured two week try. I always tell people that I talk to save faith for your place of worship. Don't believe a word Steven and I say. Go try it.
That's why we don't limit you. You could put ten terabytes up there during your two week trial. Just delete it before the end of the two weeks, or we're gonna wanna charge you for that. Right?
Alright. Steven, you said there was some questions. Do you wanna what do we got?
Yeah. I can take so Johannes in the in the chat here, asked a question. Can you explain how to use the create link feature with LucidLink? So, yeah, I'll I'll go ahead and share my screen, and I'll show you what that looks like. So alright.
So I should offer current product, the LucidLink two point seven that you that you can go and try, just like Clayton was showing you today. We have this option. You you'll see when I do right click on a folder, I mentioned the pin option before. And that's so right underneath that is something called copy link.
What that does is if I hit copy link, it's just gonna load my clipboard up with a a link that will take other users on my team directly to that folder. Now it's important to note that this does not work with people that don't already have access to it. So they've gotta be a member of the of the file space. They've got to have permission to that folder.
But if those two criteria are met, then, in fact, let's let's show this in action. Alright. So I'm gonna go to you still have access to zero zero media, Clayton? Is that true?
I do. I Alright.
So I'm gonna navigate to the zero zero media folder. I'll go into the wellness folder. I'm gonna right click on that, and I'm gonna hit copy link. Now I'm gonna go into our Zoom chat, and you'll notice if anyone else here takes this link and tries pasting into a browser, it will do nothing for you. But if Clayton does it, and I'll stop sharing so he we can see it on his screen.
I'll share. So I've copied the link. I'll paste it into a web browser, and it's gonna say, let let me get the actual right link this time. Well, there there was it. And that was fun. Alright. Chat.
Oh, you know why my mouse is on it. It does it overrides copy. Okay. Let's check this again. Alright. Now let's paste that in there this time correctly.
And it says open Lucid, and I say, yep. Please do.
And there we go. Oops.
You saw that took him right to the wellness folder. It is.
Took me right to the wellness folder. In fact, if there were files in there and one was highlight when Steven generated the link, it would also take me directly to the specific file.
Yeah. So it's such as a convenience feature, really, if you're kinda communicating back and forth with colleague and say, hey. Check out these files or whatever it might be. You just copy link and and send it to them so they don't they don't have to describe where it is.
Yep. And, listen, Steve and I can't say too much, but do watch the LucidLink space over the next month or so, and, you'll be see hopefully see some really exciting stuff coming out from us. And we really, you know, can't get into the, road map too much, but I don't know about Steve, but I'm extremely excited where we're headed as a company. I think that we're just gonna continue to make things easier for everyone. It's my hope.
Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. If you, I'm sure if for a lot of people here, they may have seen we do have our three point o, you know, community preview environment running. You are able to go in and check that out if you are interested, but that that that's the that's the space to watch for some news, in the near future.
Well, thank you, everyone. And if there's no other questions, Steven, I also thank you. I know that, you know, you're really busy, but continued great work on all the instructional videos. You know, it comes up all the time.
We get great feedback. So if any of you are are confused or anything, you know, refer to the website. Do you go to the resources page, the support page? We have tons of workflows there.
We've got scripting examples. We have just just a wealth of information to so please do stop by and check us out.
Yeah.
It looks like we have one more question popped up in the yeah.
There we go. Do you wanna take that one, Clayton?
Oh, yeah. As a team getting started with the LucidLink centralized workflow, flow, are there any common user behaviors you have found to be an impediment for success? Yeah. The number one, people still wanna drag and drop all the files locally to their desktop.
I can't tell you how many times that happens because they're just so used to working that way.
And then, Steven, I don't know if you have another one. One more I would add there is that people, I think, don't quite understand the relation between bit rate and and and aspect ratio. When I ask what bit rates, in other words, how much data are you needing to push in your postproduction workflow, I used to I I get answers like four k all the time. You know?
Bit rate is a how much data do you know? For example, ProRes is gonna be really, really high. If you're getting talking raw, it's probably seven hundred megabits a gig. So watch your bit rate.
You can get away with incredibly low bit rates these days and have a great experience.
A lot of people say, but my Netflix four k looks great at home. Can you do that? It's probably streaming at, like, fifteen megabits per second. So, yeah, it does look great. So keep your bit rates fair for everyone involved. We all tend to set our bit rates for the last part, which is color or conform.
When weeks were don't do that. You don't need to do that. We could, you know, get into more of that later. But, Steven, I don't know if you have any other ones.
Yeah. Yeah. Philip, it's a great question. Anytime you're you're moving, as a team into a a centralized or collaborative environment for the first time, things like naming conventions and folder structures are huge. And I see you know, you said clear guidelines need to be set. Absolutely.
Put some put a little time into workshopping what that needs to look like for your team. If you suddenly take twelve different people's organizational structures and stick them together with no planning, it gets messy real fast. So just come to some agree agreements on, you know, what the folder structure is gonna look like, you know, naming conventions and things like that, and you'll thank yourself later.
Yeah. Absolutely.
On that note, Steven, I forgot about, showing one last thing here, everyone.
The whole delivery part. Right? So, again, I don't like shipping hard drives. I don't like signet I don't like having to collect things and all this stuff that we're used to.
Right? So oh, you know what? Oh, I still have it. Good. So if I go into my deliverables folder, I've got my stems, all this stuff.
I did kinda talk about it. But now I just add my vendors to the to, like, my, subtitle and closed caption vendors.
I'll probably give them access to these three things, not the final version.
I don't need to send them anything. And more importantly, they don't need to download on the other side, so they're gonna thank you too.
Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
We have another question, that came in the q and a. Does LucidLink do any compression?
So you'll notice if you dig into the control panel, there is this option for compression level. That is a lossless compression type, so it's typically typically only gonna be applied to things like, documents or or files that have not already been compressed. So, more importantly, if you put, the video or audio assets into LucidLink, we do not monkey with them. They do not get transcoded.
Nothing changes the quality level. Whatever you put in is exactly what you're gonna get back out. So that's I know it's really important for people that do color grading or finishing or really any anything where you wanna make sure the quality is is up to par. And so that's be reassured.
Like, whatever you put in is exactly what you're you're gonna get back out. And for anyone who was listening, you know, fifteen minutes ago, and we were talking about the security part, You know, part of that zero knowledge security model, means that we can't transcode your, you know, your your product. You know? Whatever you put in, it the the lossless compression is checked on your client as you're the one uploading it.
But if, like I said, if it's already compressed, that step gets skipped. It goes directly into the file space. And from that point on, it's gonna be exactly what you put in is what you get back out.
And on the, APFS question great question. If you're a Windows user, we allow you to set your cache location outside of your internal drive. Just make sure your SSD drive is, n NTFS.
We we don't like exFAT. It it introduces latency. It doesn't really work with how we read and write data.
And if you happen to be bringing your own s three bucket to the party, you will need to create a new s three bucket due to the way we atomize, encrypt, and store the data. You'll see a bunch of little tiny file objects appearing in your in your, your cloud storage bucket.
And as a reminder, let's say you have an AWS s three bucket. AWS cannot decrypt your data either. Nobody can but you. That's very important to us and very important for you to know.
Absolutely. Lose your passwords either. We can't help you.
Put a little link in the chat about, cache configuration, best practices, common questions. There's even a couple of the videos in there.
Yeah. Everybody grab that link.
And, you know, we're we're always around. Right? If you need some help, hit the help button on the on the website. You know, on on the app, there is a support button if you run into any problems. I'll just kind of just show that to everybody real quick.
If you do decide so down here, you'll see the support link. Also, do us a favor and upload a diagnostic report if you do create a support ticket because that will allow us to, find the issue much, much faster.
In this video, you'll mind that it's distributed rendering.
It's up in your taskbar. Yeah. It's it's probably up in your taskbar.
I'll throw I'll throw this link in the chat here as well. Guys, this is the this is the one in case you wanna share it out that focuses on the distributed rendering piece that we were highlighting today.
I love that one. Steven, you did a great job on that. By the way, Steven does most of our you know, a lot of our videos. So, thanks again to all of you. It really is great seeing all of you.
Happy to hello to Krista Thompson. If you are the Krista Thompson, I think you are. It's so good to see you here. If not, nice to meet you.
It's been wonderful just having, you know, all of you here with us today. As you can see, again, this is not science fair stuff. This is not hard to do. If you're intimidated, hit us up.
We'll try our best to help you through it. It's really not hard. So we hope you get the most out of your workflow wherever you may be, and, give us a try and lose the link if you haven't yet. I think you will not regret it.
Steven, any closing words from you?
I think you did. You you summed it up. Thank thanks everybody, and, we'll we'll talk to you later.
Be well, everyone. Thanks again for your time.
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