Can I easily set up remote acess?

June 11, 2008 6:05 AM

I work in a small office where among other things we shoot and edit training videos. My boss who usually gets involved at the later stages of the editing process is moving to Colorado and we need to figure out how he can access the workstation here to review the editing process and tell us what changes he wants to see incorporated in the final video.

We are a small company overall and we have a network admin but he is located in another state and so we are pretty much on our own with this one. Right now our office just has a cable internet connection into a router so we can all connect to the internet wirelessly. Is there an easy way to set things up so our boss can access the desktop of the workstation we use for video editing so he can at least run the video from within Premiere and review it in the monitor window so he can send us his changes? There is no need for him to actually do any of the editing process only review the raw footage.

He has some idea of buying a a second copy of Premiere and having us burn the project files to DVD's and send them to Colorado so he can run them locally which seems to me to be a dumb way of trying to do business. So I’m not a network person but I wondered if there is a way of setting this up as a VPN so he can access it remotely. Is this do-able given our lack of expertise or am I out of luck? Any suggestions or pointers to helpful sites or articles on how-to-do this are much appreciated.

posted by 543DoublePlay to computers & internet (6 comments total)

editing over a remote screen at the end of a DSL line is going to be excruciatingly slow - you're essentially planning on sending uncompressed video (as displayed on screen) over the DSL slow direction... this is unlikely to be much fun for anyone...
posted by russm at 6:37 AM on June 11, 2008

If these were still images, remote access would work great.

But real-time video over consumer-level broadband is going to be unworkably slow. You might - might - be able to work up something by dumping the raw video out into something highly compressed that he could watch over something like a Slingbox. But in the end, assuming the price is acceptable, FedExing DVDs is, in fact, definitely your best path. It's a scaled-down version of the old network 'joke' that the fastest internet connection still has nothing on a station wagon filled with tape cartridges.
posted by Tomorrowful at 6:42 AM on June 11, 2008

It looks like Adobe had you in mind with Adobe Clip Notes in Premiere CS3.
I have not tried this and don't know how good the feature is, but it's worth a look.

The concept is that you export the video project to a PDF file, with the video embedded (or something) then you email the PDF to your Client (boss) the client watches it in acrobat reader and can type time specific comments in the PDF witch he then emails back to you.

From their Help

From their website

See it in action
posted by StephenMeldalFoged at 7:25 AM on June 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Well, I doubt VNC or remote desktop over a WAN is going to do this. Heck, it can barely do video over a high-speed LAN.

I would just do batch nightly downloads of the project and have him run premiere on his computer. You should have no problem downloading 5-10 gigs of compressed video overnight over a medium speed DSL line. If he's just doing approval you can probably get by with a low-quality version of that video.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:51 AM on June 11, 2008

Not sure why your boss needs to be physically using Premiere, unless he's the hands-on type who likes to get in the way. I work in TV production - we always make DVD playouts of cuts with timecode burned into the picture and courier them to the boss man who writes down any timecodes where he has issues with the edit.

Also used to work on a show where the composers were on the other side of the world so we'd capture mpegs of the 30 minute cut (around 1gb) and upload them to a server. It didn't take too long, but then, we had a real time capturing program. If your training videos are relatively short you can just export lo-res quicktimes and upload them somewhere.

If it's a normal thing for him to be watching edits within Premiere and then physically doing any changes himself (which i would consider to be weird), then yeah, having his own copy of the software and the project files sent over would be the best way - but, as you say, it seems a dumb way of doing business.
posted by mooza at 9:01 AM on June 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Boyoboy. I'm with Mooza on this. One of the worst time sinks in the world is to give your client or higher-up access to raw footage. If you're billing by the hour, and you have a high tolerance for pain, and you don't mind if the project comes out awkwardly edited, then you might want to let your client micromanage your work like this.

Timecode onscreen in a rough cut is the definition of a "window dub", which is the standard production answer to this question for decades. Burn (render) a window dub at ~QVGA 380kbps MP4 (H.264) and you can ship the video in real time on a slow DSL connection.

(The format above works for me world wide with top tier advertisers and media outlets, and is very convenient for audio production. Anything that requires more detail or definition or feedback or micromanaging gets FedExed.)
posted by lothar at 9:53 AM on June 11, 2008