Video editing in the cloud?

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Ramos

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Mar 2, 2016
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I've been designing yet another rig for 4k 100 fps video editing or 6k raw editing.

Then I wondered how often I would use all that horsepower as the bill in Excel crept skywards as usual.

Could one order a heavy VM with video editing software on it (Bring your license) or even do it as SaaS and then do 4k editing from a 4k monitor laptop with a 50/50 mbps stable inet connection or better?

Surely it would be just like remote desktopping a 4k environment without choppyness and that should be fine on a 5050 connection if you got it for yourself.

So is this a viable option for a pro-sumer videographer?

I don't make much money on the videos so it will never be feasible for me to hire an editor due to profit margins.

I already use the clouds (Azure and AWS) a lot for work, so its not the tech part, but more the feasibility of the attempt I am asking about.

Is there anything I forget, that will make this hard over a cloud connection?

PS: I am not doing coloration work or micro-management editing that will require the colors to be exact and hyperprecise. I spend maybe 1 hr to edit 5-10 mins and just the cutting and some polishing off and finetuning timing of soundtracks etc, nothing fancy cause it will not be paid for anyway,

Video camera is intended to be a Kinefinity Terra 4k.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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What are you current bottlenecks and reason for considering cloud in the first place? What hardware are you using currently? Video editing covers a multitude of sins...

Control freak non-cloud user here so you're going to get a biased answer, but... even with a "large" upload bandwidth of 50Mb/s I'd imagine bandwidth is going to be by far the biggest constraining factor for you, especially if you're dealing in 4k60p and up. The not-especially-high-quality-4k-ish stuff that comes out of my Lumix is massive, and takes a significant amount of time to transfer anywhere that isn't from one SSD to another.

The answer to your question depends greatly on your source material and the software you use I guess, but Ryzen has made >4P an affordable reality on the desktop side of things (and Intel are finally following suit albeit much more expensively) which will help greatly with most transcoding/heavy lifting.
 
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Nizmo

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Jan 24, 2018
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Missing component here seems to be GPU and disks. SSD's are the way to go, but NVMe is your friend here. 4K60p would love to see 2000MB+ scratch disc write speeds.

Something like this would IMO need some sort of DDA GPU (Tesla/Quaddro) possibly GeForce but I am personally unsure of any of this on the AWS or Azure platform. Do they guarantee an IOPS performance even during high cloud loads? A specialty host may be better? My 2 cents :)
 

Ramos

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Mar 2, 2016
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What are you current bottlenecks and reason for considering cloud in the first place? What hardware are you using currently? Video editing covers a multitude of sins...

Control freak non-cloud user here so you're going to get a biased answer, but... even with a "large" upload bandwidth of 50Mb/s I'd imagine bandwidth is going to be by far the biggest constraining factor for you, especially if you're dealing in 4k60p and up. The not-especially-high-quality-4k-ish stuff that comes out of my Lumix is massive, and takes a significant amount of time to transfer anywhere that isn't from one SSD to another.

The answer to your question depends greatly on your source material and the software you use I guess, but Ryzen has made >4P an affordable reality on the desktop side of things (and Intel are finally following suit albeit much more expensively) which will help greatly with most transcoding/heavy lifting.
Current HW is a 2x 2670 from when they were dirt cheap and for exporting a GTX 770 GPU and done on a regular 4k screen. But I would love more power than this and I only wanna pay for it when I need it.

Also and more importantly, I would love do the editing while on location from a laptop like a x360 Spectre or a Yoga 920.

50 Mbps was a low number, I can get 100 and even 400 Mbps where I am going to be some places so that will not be the biggest of problems.

What Ryzen gear are we talking?
 
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Ramos

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Mar 2, 2016
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Missing component here seems to be GPU and disks. SSD's are the way to go, but NVMe is your friend here. 4K60p would love to see 2000MB+ scratch disc write speeds.

Something like this would IMO need some sort of DDA GPU (Tesla/Quaddro) possibly GeForce but I am personally unsure of any of this on the AWS or Azure platform. Do they guarantee an IOPS performance even during high cloud loads? A specialty host may be better? My 2 cents :)
Well from what I have edited so far (Just Hero 6 4k 60 footage), the GPU is just used for exporting the final video and for desktop 4k'ing and some light loads while editing. But I could be wrong here. And ofc the 770 is not that fast at exporting, just "kinda" faster than using the 2 x 2670 CPUs.

I was planning on using a AWS EC2 like a i3.4xlarge, which comes with 2x 1900 GB NVMe SSDs and doesn't cost an insane amount ($2/hr) if we assume I set it up once and shut it down when not using it.

Then keep raw on S3 and transfer to disks on startups and edit and when done, transfer result to S3 again. EC2 to S3 is about 2-400 MB/s.

With a 8 GB Elastic GPU added on it rises to $2.4/hr.

What I don't know, is whether this will work or not yet, but I guess I could try it with the Hero6 files.
 

Jon Massey

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Nov 11, 2015
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I've not yet found a good solution for this, even locally (over GbE) I find that RDP with RemoteFX has audio lag issues in Premiere Pro.
 

Jeggs101

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Dec 29, 2010
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When you're doing Windows in a VM you've got to be wary of license restrictions.

Video editing is still on prem because bandwidth. Prosumer video editing even more since US ISPs started putting in BW caps.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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Assume this is exporting via nvenc then...? In my experience the quality's always been a bit crappy on those. Quicksync is better than nvenc in quality-per-bit IME but I've almost always gone with plain jane software encodes via x264 or x265 since the stuff I do I do for quality rather than speed.

When you say 2670 I assume you mean the Sandy Bridge E5-2670? Are those your current bottleneck, i.e. does one ore more CPUs run at 100% when you're doing your work?

In terms of the ryzen stuff, the 16C threadripper kits are where it's at but I wasn't aware you were already using a 16C system and, assuming you're doing the final export solely on a graphics card I'm a bit surprised you're short of CPU grunt. What sort of editing steps are you doing?

Personally I've never used higher than a 16C machine for video, the encode to x265 is always the part that uses the most CPU (by far!) and I've never seen it scale much above 10-12 CPUs.
 

Nizmo

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Jan 24, 2018
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I've not yet found a good solution for this, even locally (over GbE) I find that RDP with RemoteFX has audio lag issues in Premiere Pro.
In fairness, Windows Servers at this point need be 10Gb and up, if your NIC has 2 ports you can even bond them for 20Gb. NVMe (good ones) will saturate 5GB/s easily without any raid yet.

RemoteFX with a GPU, on 10Gb can run 35ish RDP VM's or Sessions with a single Connection broker (pending CAL's) with no audio or performance issues with a proper disk setup (NVMe).
 
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Ramos

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Mar 2, 2016
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When you're doing Windows in a VM you've got to be wary of license restrictions.

Video editing is still on prem because bandwidth. Prosumer video editing even more since US ISPs started putting in BW caps.
I am not in the US and will only be doing some of the video editing from the US.

My cloud VMs etc usually reside in Frankfurt or Ireland (AWS) or Northern EU (Azure).

Are there restrictions on using Cyberlink PowerDirector (PD) on a cloud machine? ... I need to look into that then.

Using PD cause Premiere is too pricy for me as its a low buck operation, mostly for fun, but I want the little income I get to pay for equipment eventually.
 

Ramos

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Mar 2, 2016
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Assume this is exporting via nvenc then...? In my experience the quality's always been a bit crappy on those. Quicksync is better than nvenc in quality-per-bit IME but I've almost always gone with plain jane software encodes via x264 or x265 since the stuff I do I do for quality rather than speed.

When you say 2670 I assume you mean the Sandy Bridge E5-2670? Are those your current bottleneck, i.e. does one ore more CPUs run at 100% when you're doing your work?

In terms of the ryzen stuff, the 16C threadripper kits are where it's at but I wasn't aware you were already using a 16C system and, assuming you're doing the final export solely on a graphics card I'm a bit surprised you're short of CPU grunt. What sort of editing steps are you doing?

Personally I've never used higher than a 16C machine for video, the encode to x265 is always the part that uses the most CPU (by far!) and I've never seen it scale much above 10-12 CPUs.
I use the exporter in PowerDirector when I do x264 or x265 exports. It supports GPU for that but not sure how and tbh I have not compared outputs from CPU vs GPU encodes. I'll get that done first, cause it would save a lot of costs on a video rig if I can just go all CPU as the GPU would then just have to run 4k desktopping for RDP.

Yes sorry, it was all the rage on StH about 18 months ago. 2x Xeon E5-2670v1 to be exact. The rigs were dirt cheap back then.

The CPUs run at 100% when doing exports and it takes time for just a 5 min clip in 4k 50 fps (Cannot export higher atm iirc). It seems to pressure the CPUs a little but not a lot when I do actual editing and move clips around, recalc the preview, etc.

Sorry if it was unclear, I have no immediate current bottlenecks except some slow response times at some points, but I need todo it from remote locations as well, and I guess I could RDP back to my owner server too, but I would like to have the freedom to choose cloud and just rent the newest and baddest and just pay per hour.

If the worst case export only scales to 12 cores, would it not be better to get a 10C i9 7900X or is the Threadripper 16C still a better choice?
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Are you're trying to spend money for a problem you don't really have? unless I'm reading it wrong this is all about 'making it faster' not doing something you cannot do? You don't need to make it faster for your hobby, or to pay your equipment back you can do that faster by not buying or renting something you don't need. I have some buddys who do video work professionally on the side who can't afford a good computer system/rather buy more camera gear and are running on an i7, they let it run overnight to produce the LONG videos, it works :)

I would opt for this, get more 'jobs' then build something local that's badass :)
 

Ramos

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Mar 2, 2016
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Are you're trying to spend money for a problem you don't really have? unless I'm reading it wrong this is all about 'making it faster' not doing something you cannot do? You don't need to make it faster for your hobby, or to pay your equipment back you can do that faster by not buying or renting something you don't need. I have some buddys who do video work professionally on the side who can't afford a good computer system/rather buy more camera gear and are running on an i7, they let it run overnight to produce the LONG videos, it works :)

I would opt for this, get more 'jobs' then build something local that's badass :)
You are absolute right for now, but I wanted to futureproof myself. But I can take that problem on when I get to it.

I was just testing stuff that I can last night (editing 4k 60 only since I dont have 4k 100 yet). And that works kinda fine. Not great, its choppy still. And if 60 fps is choppy in raw, would 100 fps be bareable?

And I was wondering if getting a 16C rig with more core speeds or newer CPUs (My E5-v1 is 32nm) would make it less choppy. And instead of upgrading a homerig that needs to be maintained etc, a $20/session video editing rig in the cloud seemed so much more convenient.

Most of the time, I don't use the 16C rig for that, but just desktop and developement so a laptop would be fine 99% of the time.

The problem with remoting into home setup is not internet, I have 150/150 at home. It's the power bill, so I need to set up wake-on-lan on the server for this to be efficient when gone 2 weeks travelling.

I just dunno how to justify the purchase of a super expensive Threadripper rig.