Remote Media Sharing and Collaboration – Featuring Hedge’s Postlab

August 5, 2022

Mixing Light Contributors talk with Hedge.video's Isaac Terronez about affordable remote collaboration using Postlab and Postlab Drive.


Series

Office Hours – July 14, 2022

Mixing Light Contributors R. Neil Haugen, Peder Morgenthaler, and Zeb Chadfield join host Patrick Inhofer in a Mixing Light Office hours discussion with special guest Isaac Terronez. Isaac is the U.S. Workflow Architect for Hedge.video.

Today’s discussion included:

  • What are Postlab and Postlab drive?
  • How is Lucid Link related to the Postlab products?
  • Using PostLab with the Premiere Pro Teams workflow
  • How to set up FCP libraries for PostLab sharing and file locking
  • A quick comment about EditReady
  • A tip from Patrick on enabling a not-obvious feature on Resolve’s built-in scopes

Table Of Contents

(bold items are member questions)

  • 00:00 Introduction
  • 01:00 Lightening Round Introduction
  • 01:18 Neil – Multicam tip
  • 02:34 Peder – Just started working with a remote team using Lucid Link
  • 03:36 Rich – Joins us momentarily to talk about starting to use ‘virtual drives’ for sending dailies to remote collaborators, with good experience
  • 04:06 Zeb – How his facility used virtual drives to bypass a server outage in their local area network, without missing a beat
  • 05:30 Patrick – Shows a quick DaVinci Resolve tip that allows the qualifier cursor to show the pixels you’re selecting on Resolve’s internal scopes
  • 06:15 Isaac – New details he’s learned about the bass line from the Michael Jackson song, “Billy Jean”
  • 09:09 Introduction to Isaac and the discussion on Hedge, Postlab, and Postlab Drive
  • 13:07 What is the problem that Postlab Drive is solving? And how is it related to Lucid Link (and what is Lucid Link)?
  • 16:37 Neil: His experience with Lucid Link’s upper tier service and the responsiveness of the file sharing
  • 18:28 Peder: Important bandwidth considerations when setting up a project for sharing media files by taking into account the slowest internet connection on the team
  • 19:13 Neil: Points out the unique file-locking capabilities of Postlab, beyond what Lucid Link offers
  • 19:48 Zeb: How the Lucid Link technology works far better than any seasoned post-production professional will reasonably expect
  • 22:54 Patrick: Lucid Link has two tiers. What is Postlab Drive integrating and is it possible it use their other tiers of service for Postlab Drive?
  • 24:47 Peder: What’s the ‘extra sauce’ that Postlab is adding to their Lucid Link integration?
  • 25:03 Isaac: Postlab Drive as a file sharing service
  • 27:20 MASV’s integration with Postlab Drive
  • 31:45 Peder: The pricing model for Postlab Drive, Lucid Link, and the challenges with ‘egress’ costs
  • 34:56 Zeb: Shares his observation about caching issues that force you to re-download source material
  • 35:44 What is Postlab and how is it different than Postlab Drive?
  • 39:58 Zeb & Isaac: Avid Bin Locking using Postlab
  • 42:11 Neil: His experience using Premiere Pro’s team and collaborative workflows using a BYO (build your own) S3 bucket
  • 45:25 Isaac: The experience of Hedge’s clients using Premiere’s Teams workflow with Postlab; plus, additional features for assigning tasks, comments, keeping an activity log, and saving templates for new projects.
  • 47:41 Arthur (video question): When using FCP and the Color Finale plugin, are there any limitations we should be concerned about if we’re using Postlab?
  • 48:59 Isaac: How to use FCP with Postlab for the smoothest remote collaboration experience and managing plug-ins without breaking license agreements.
  • 52:48 Zeb: Best practices for distributing installers to ensure everyone on the remote team is using the same version of the software, fonts, etc.
  • 53:21 Isaac: Postlab with DaVinci Resolve workflows, including using Disk-based databases or integrating Blackmagic Cloud with PostLab Drive
  • 54:53 Patrick: Is Postlab and Postlab Drive cross-platform?
  • 56:11 Patrick: Understanding Hedge’s latest product acquisition, EditReady and how it integrates into the workflows we’ve been discussing
  • 57:48 Conclusion and Goodbye

Mentioned in this Insight


Comments

Homepage Forums Remote Media Sharing and Collaboration – Featuring Hedge’s Postlab


  • David Cecil
    Member

    This was really helpful in gaining more knowledge in regards to just the standard cloud workflow, appreciate the work that went into this meeting!

    Had a question in regards to the portion about plugins and the like. If someone doesn’t have the same plugins, I’m assuming they’ll get either a media offline or watermark over it as soon as it is applied in another person’s workflow? I currently do finishing for color and audio, and the amount of plugins for my Fairlight tab alone is extensive, let alone the DCTLs and a handful of OFXs for color designs. What would the suggestion be for routing on this since Resolve 18 allows for the cloud workflow, but not everyone on the post team can either afford or needs those applications for their particular part of the pipeline?

    • Hey David!  Glad you found the conversation helpful.

       

      The plug-in issue is definitely a stumbling block in this kind of shared workflow.  I don’t have any experience on the Fairlight side of things, but I know that Resolve isn’t the best at notifying about missing plugins, LUTs & DCTLs elsewhere.  Depending on the plugin you may get a “One or more OpenFX plugins are missing” message when you connect to a shared database containing projects that use those plugins, but ou don’t get a watermark of offline warning in the individual projects. The effect just isn’t applied in the chain.  That makes it hard to know what’s missing.

      As these workflows become more common, I’d like to see platforms like Resolve work with plugin creators to create more flexible solutions, where required assets like plugins could be shared on-demand from the project server when necessary.

  • This issue is a huge thing in the major workflows with Premiere also. One of the generally accepted (in practice, though not always public discussed) “rules” for large team working is the proper care and feeding of the plugins through the project.

    Realistically, either they have to be ‘shared’ by all computers accessing the joint project, or … the users of them need to finish their work and create replacement media so that other users can do their work.

    Like vfx people finishing their plates, then exporting out a full video clip to replace the comp or other placeholder/original media on the working sequences. Audio people with a ton of VSTs need to create replacement audio tracks for the sequences also.

    And editors using plugins will also have to create replacement media. Perhaps naturally, editors seem somewhat more unaware of their need to do this than vfx/audio/color staffers.

    So the use of plugins is something that 1) needs to  be discussed/negotiated from the start and 2) should only be done with the knowledge that it will likely require another generation of ‘original/working’ media in the project. So care with that work is of paramount importance.

    In the Adobe booth a NAB or two ago, Karl soule was giving a 20-minute talk on the then most recent changes in meta-handling available for long-format workflows/Hollywood work. But a question came up pretty early on about plugins … and the rest of that presentation was simply Karl and several users talking about different issues and workarounds for plugins at various stages of the process. He clearly didn’t ‘finish’ his prepared presentation, but I thought the actual disussion more useful.


    • David Cecil
      Member

      This is such a great point! And perhaps something that not only the editing team, but plugin creators and NLE providers should dive into as well.

      as an example, I absolutely love using Izotope RX for cleaning up dialogue for a mix and master session. While it would otherwise throttle Resolve since it has to look at subsamples instead of regular frames, they’ve allowed the option to export the desired clip into their standalone plugin, do the necessary work, then automatically replace it inside Fairlight with a comp file that lays on top of the previous, untouched one.

      Like you said, ensuring you organize beforehand to dictate where these comps go is paramount, but that form of external script, bring back in workflow is managed on the  preference level instead of project settings, so it could be a viable way to work with remote systems.

      Now if only DCTLs and other OFXs had the same routing. At the very least, the remote system as it is right now allows for using default Resolve functions, which can go the distance by themselves. Being able to get a basic shot dev on clips before being fully handed off should never go underestimated


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Administrator

    Just a quick comment about the Video Scopes tip for showing the circle overlays in the waveforms… That feature was introduced with Resolve 16. I’m amazed that I missed/forgot about it.

    Although, since I run with external scopes, I guess I haven’t interacted much with the onboard scopes in the past many years. Now I have a reason to keep it open in the lower right corner for quick peeks.

Log in to reply.

1,000+ Tutorials to Explore

Get full access to our entire library of over 1,100+ color tutorials for an entire week!


Start Your Test Drive!
Loading...