Editor’s note: “What was your favorite problem you helped solve in the past year?” This is the question we posed to our Technical Solutions team at the start of the year. Their answers reveal some of the best problem-solving taking place on Rally media supply chains today.
Paul, tell us what this user was trying to accomplish.
Our customer had a remote team executing QC tasks on laptops, utilizing a common NLE. While they had successfully migrated their content library and processing workflows to the cloud, they needed to add editing capability in addition to the QC tasks. This is where the process broke down: the customer experienced unnecessary expenses, administrative headaches, and the possibility of security vulnerabilities inherent in maintaining remote workstations.
What was your role in coming up with a solution?
I served as the lead Technical Account Manager along with SDVI Technical Account Manager Justin Bracegirdle, who implemented the final design.
What was the “before state”?
At the time we were brought into the project, the customer’s existing QC processes involved use of NLE applications, installed as part of an image on a company issued laptop. Maintaining application versions and compatibility between systems put a great deal of burden on IT as well as operators. Plus, operators might let software deprecate simply because they preferred the version they were used to, or they might just want to avoid the hassle of updating.
Maintaining accurate records of which NLE software versions were used by which operators was already a large burden, but adding editing workflows really required enforcement of NLE versioning. Edit jobs could not be completed if the encoder used on a given piece of media did not match that of the edit software.
To complete their QC jobs in this particular workflow, operators were pulling content down from the cloud in various formats depending on the NLE version they were using, storing it either on-prem while they worked on it or, worse yet, storing it directly on their laptop. Migrating all of that content in and out of the cloud both generated a lot of egress cost and weakened the security posture of their supply chain overall.
The customer was in search of a simple solution that would:
- Keep content in the cloud environment, eliminating egress costs and reliance on legacy on-prem storage (or laptops).
- Give editors (and administrators!) a consistent workstation setup utilizing a single, current NLE.
- Add robust edit and versioning capabilities into a new, optimized workflow.
What does the new workflow look like?
The new workflow provides clear visibility, consistency, and security. Editors use a cloud-based NLE in SDVI Rally Access Workstation, supported by Accurate.Video Validate for validation. Rally Access Workstation initiates an edit session using all the necessary cloud infrastructure and pre-loads the media and metadata needed to perform manual QC and compliance tasks. Users can work with either full-resolution or proxy material, all in the cloud with no egress of data to a local machine or server. And any encoding that is required happens in the cloud, so editors to keep doing edit jobs instead of waiting for renders to complete.
While they can still use their company-issued laptops for edit jobs, the new system allows them to perform edits in the cloud on content that stays – securely – in the cloud.
What can the customer do now that they couldn’t do before?
The customer now has a full edit/versioning workflow that is maintained in the Rally environment by administrators and can grow or contract as needed. Administrators now enjoy full control of both content and the NLE version their team is using. Content and updated NLE versions are fully tested in “lower” staging/test environments, using the same supply chains as production environments.
Furthermore, the organization can be assured that manual QC and versioning processes will not expose them to needless egress costs or security vulnerabilities.
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Have a media supply chain challenge you’re not sure how to solve? Reach out and lets start a conversation about how cloud-enabled workflows could help.
