A Fully Managed Solution for Editing in the Cloud
Every media operations department must deal with a wide range of inputs and outputs as they receive content from multiple sources and prepare that content for delivery to an ever-growing universe of destinations. Luckily, many of the tasks required to move content through the supply chain can be automated. And as we’ve discussed here before, it makes great sense to move these tasks — transcoding, audio leveling, technical QC, and more — to elastic cloud-based infrastructure.
But what happens when something is not quite right with a piece of media? When someone on the operations team must manually modify the content before it can proceed? To use a familiar editing tool, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, to complete edit tasks, they must interrupt the supply chain and bring the content (or a proxy of it) to a local workstation. Once they finish the on-premises edit, a new asset can be rendered in the cloud using the EDL, and then the supply chain continues.
While this hybrid model has worked, thanks to the integration of time-based metadata into the edit tools via customized panels, imagine how much more efficient operators could be if they could undertake the entire process in the cloud. What if there were no movement of content to local workstations for any type of edit needed as that content moves through a supply chain?
While the SDVI Rally platform is well-known for its ability to move media operations to the cloud, we set out to make the edit tasks yet another part of the supply chain that can live entirely in the cloud. To that end, we recently introduced Rally Access Workstation, a fully managed solution for editing in the cloud with Adobe Premiere Pro. The most immediate benefit Rally users realize with this new capability is anywhere, anytime access by authorized editors to hosted edit workstations and content in the cloud. Also key: dynamic provisioning by the Rally platform of associated infrastructure to enable agile, cost-effective scaling of edit capacity.
Alone, these are tremendous advantages for a media organization. But if you’re a Rally user, perhaps the most significant aspect of this first-of-a-kind edit-in-the-supply-chain model is that it empowers you to shift vital manual edits to the cloud, making these tasks an integral part of an end-to-end cloud supply chain enabled and enhanced by robust orchestration, smart workorder management, and dynamic infrastructure provisioning. You now can handle one of the most critical elements of content preparation entirely in the cloud along with other supply chain operations.
All Key Operations Now in the Cloud
Though it begins after the production process itself is complete, the preparation of content for distribution often requires a variety of editing tasks. In fact, it’s impossible to run a media supply chain without occasionally interrupting automated tasks to perform some form of edit. Whether to ensure the quality, legality, or compliance of content, these editing tasks are essential to delivering content that meets both customer requirements and consumer expectations.
The more tightly you integrate these manual editing tasks into the automated media supply chain, the more agile and efficient your media organization can be in preparing content, and the more responsive it can be to opportunity and demand.
When your organization moves editing tasks to the cloud, you can give any number of editors flexible access to high-end editing tools while reducing the time and money you spend maintaining and managing on-prem edit suites. At the same time, you can leverage all the benefits of working within Rally Access to streamline workorder management and all the strengths of the cloud to realize unprecedented scalability and cost efficiencies.
Best of all, rather than continually manage infrastructure as needs change and work endlessly to maintain and schedule a fleet of physical edit workstations, you can leave the heavy lifting to Rally. With Rally Access Workstation, editing in the supply chain becomes a fully managed element of your operations.
Edit Within the Composable Media Supply Chain
Once implemented, what does edit in the supply chain look like for your organization? Shifting manual edits into the cloud and allowing content to stay there too, Rally Access Workstation reduces common costs and constraints associated with on-premises edit models. You not only avoid latencies and egress costs commonly associated with on-premises edit workstations, but also gain the capacity to scale edit capacity at will, with infrastructure automatically provisioned as needed.
In this edit-in-the-supply-chain model, manual edits are part of a fully managed engagement that integrates human tasks and automated jobs. Thus, upon starting a workorder, an authorized editor automatically spins up a licensed instance of Adobe Premiere Pro on a cloud-based virtual workstation with all content (high-resolution and/or proxy) preloaded in the bin. Identified by automated processing upstream in the supply chain, markers on the timeline correspond to workorder items that need attention. With all media and metadata ready for immediate work, the editor makes edits on the timeline, hits submit, and the job is complete.
The edit session runs in the cloud and, as with every other step in the supply chain, the infrastructure needed to support that task is composed on the fly to support that activity. This is true for one editor taking on one workorder item, or for hundreds of editors working simultaneously to ensure timely fulfillment of a massive content preparation project. The edit runs in the cloud along with every other step in your supply chain — automated transcoding, QC, and so on. All these operations are managed on cloud-based composed infrastructure, which means you’re using only the resources you need, when you need them, in a supply chain that’s optimized from end to end. (Read more about cloud-based composable infrastructure in our recent blog post, “Getting Exactly What you Want From Your Media Supply Chain.”)
When it comes to optimizing your media operations, it’s not enough to implement a few automated steps and a MAM. True optimization, and maximum efficiency, happens when every step of a supply chain seamlessly comes together in a cloud-based model, under the management of an intelligent platform, and where every step, including manual edits, is informed by the steps that came before. With Rally Access Workstation, the entire media supply chain, including edits for QC and compliance, moves to the cloud, unlocking new levels of efficiency for end-to-end media operation workloads.
If you’re interested in finding out how the scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiencies of edit in the supply chain can help your organization become more agile, efficient, and responsive, let us know! With a brief Rally Access Workstation demo, you’ll quickly see the power of migrating critical edit tasks to the cloud within a fully managed solution.
