| I Avid too. And manage two sizable (300+ virtualized editors) on-premise VDI systems, and one bigger(somedays 600+) AWS-based one that holds more Adobe than Avid. Remote experience is a bandwidth and latency thing more than anything else, but the technology is limited - for example you can't do a good ProTools system virtualized with a control surface and sync can be a real pain to sort out. As for Avid's solutions to the problem: they do it a couple of ways: - Composer/Nexis all hosted on Cloud (AWS): fine, but pricy and the Nexis experience is meh - Composer hosted Cloud/Nexis hosted on Prem: actually works well, but you need to have a direct-connect to AWS (the network can be pricey) - Composer on on-premise VDI/Nexis hosted on Prem: works really well, and I have a bias towards this instead of fully in cloud for not only security reasons since the TCO is less - Composer Cloud (or whatever they call it today - used to Composer Sphere): this is a setup where instead you stream real-time proxy to the Composer from MediaCentral. You can download hi-res media if you need to. It works ok, but it more suited for News workflows. Security is a thing with this solution. - Adobe/OpenDrives on AWS: I mention this, because we do this too. This has all sorts of things to talk about, and is pretty good, but, again, you gotta know what you are doing. For the on-premise ones, VMWare is our Hypervisor of choice, and, yup, we are looking for other options. And we have all the usual IT problems: domain management, updates, roaming desktops, etc. If you are looking for 3rd-monitor image viewing (like in the old days with hardware), you can swing NDI or 2110. NDI is ok, and for 2110 you need a network and router to handle it. |
If you have time to expand on the "bandwith and latency thing", I'd love to hear more. Even a "you need to be geographically within X miles of the instance" ballpark figure would be wonderful to know.