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It's no longer a question of giving the editor with a high-performance computer for editing and exchanging video files, but a classical PC with Outlook email, intranet and the usual business applications. The CPU power and RAM required for video editing are elsewhere. The prerequisite for editing from home is a good Internet connection (fibre as far as possible) and a conventional PC. The same applies to the journalist, but a classic Internet connection will suffice.
On his PC, the editor is securely connected (via VPN) to the France Télévisions infrastructure. He uses the same business intranet as when he is on site, which gives him access to the production IT system (PAM: Production Asset Management). This is where he will have access to the media needed for his editing.
He will select them and give an order to copy them (from ifab) from the storage physically located at the France Télévisions (ifab) head office to the Amazon Cloud. It is in this same Cloud that his editing software, Adobe Premiere, is located.
From his computer, he can then connect to a PC located in the Amazon Cloud on which Premiere runs. This is called a Virtual Machine (VM). And in order to fully recover the usual working environment of a screen-based editing room, the media available in the Cloud are managed by the same PAM tool: Dalet Galaxy xCloud.
The editor will therefore be able to work from home as he would on site. Once his editing is finished, he will give a copy order (to ifab) so that it can be copied from the Cloud to FTV's internal storage and follow its usual path: mixing, broadcasting, etc.
But before that, he needs to be able to communicate with the journalist who is also at home (or in his editorial office). Microsoft Teams is the link between them, they see and hear each other and the journalist has access to Premiere's time line via screen sharing. The journalist will record his comment on his smartphone and then send the audio file to the editor, who will place it on a Premiere audio track.
The advantages of this Cloud solution
- No latency, an essential prerequisite for video editing.
- As far as hardware is concerned, a conventional PC is enough, the computing power, the RAM, everything is transferred to the Cloud.
- Scalability of the Cloud: if you want to allocate additional power to a machine, it's quick and easy. If more assembly stations are needed in the Cloud, they can be deployed quickly.
- Secure environment: under no circumstances do the media leave the FTV secure environment, they are never physically on the teleworking PC.
Possible and desired evolutions
Today, the process involves copying "high resolution" dailies (50 Mb/s) to the Amazon Cloud, which takes time and penalises the editing of "hot" subjects. In the long run, this "ingest" time should ideally be reduced by working with proxies (MPEG dash) that are less resource-intensive. This will be possible when the Dalet/Premiere couple will be able to manage editing with this proxy format.
Since 9 November, between 2 and 7 subjects per day have been edited in this way.
