An assistant-editor we work with got in touch to ask how remote editing is going for us.

Before COVID, editing on Avid and storing our shared media on an Avid Nexis was our go-to solution for editing longer projects, like TV shows. Everyone can share the same media, but lock their bins, so you can have many editors all working on the same single project. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work well for remote teams so we’ve started looking for other solutions.

Adobe Premiere, the biggest competition to Avid, just hasn’t been that great for multi-user editing until recently. A couple of months ago they released their Productions feature, which mimics Avid’s special feature, bin locking, but instead it’s called project locking. It’s essentially the same thing. While I wouldn’t use such a new version of Premiere in production without adequate testing, this is a game-changing feature. 

Enter cloud editing

Cloud editing changes all of this. While Avid has been hinting at a cloud solution for editing, there are already powerful ones that work with Premiere. BeBop Technology recently showed me a demo for their solution, and I was totally impressed.

Instead of having a powerful computer in your office (or at home) your computer lives virtually at a data center. You can access it from anywhere, though it helps for speed if it’s close to where you are. Then at home you can access your virtual remote computer through either  your home computer or, better yet, through a device called a Zero Client. With a decently fast connection, a home editor can access a very powerful computer. What really makes this powerful is that all of these virtual computers can access the same media, so when paired with the new features of Premiere, a virtual team can edit a tv show with the same speed and power of people who are all together in the same office. In the future, when people are commuting back and forth, they will be able to essentially access their workstation from anywhere they have decent broadband connectivity.

There are a lot of other benefits: it’s easier to scale up, nobody needs to buy or maintain expensive workstations, and security. Even if working from home scales down, I have a strong feeling this is the way that shows are going to be edited in the future.

The big takeaway

Now, and in the future, we won’t have to buy computers at home or at the office to have a lot of editors working on a show.