Does anyone have any experience using a VPN to edit video remotely?
I have a little, mostly doing basic things like exporting video or adding a timecode track, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to do this reasonably. We use L2TP tunneled through our SonicWall router (which handles the VPN) and from there I use Apple Remote Desktop at the second lowest quality setting to remotely control the computers. It’s way too slow to be functional for any kind of real editing, and for the most part you’re going to find that in any kind of setup you do.
The existing solutions for remote editing at this point are Adobe Anywhere and Avid Media Composer|Cloud.
What separates these two products from something like VPN with Remote Desktop/VNC is that as opposed to taking the entire screen of a remote computer and then compressing that and passing it over the Internet to your local machine which then decompresses it (which is RDC/VNC) what Anywhere/MC|C do is have programs that live on your remote machine and then work on proxy video delivered over the network/Internet. They were designed for this purpose, and therefore do it much more efficiently.
Depending on what you’ve got going on, you can kind of fake this setup, though. We’ve got a remote editor out in California and what we do is take all our media (since we work in Media Composer I just give him the Avid MediaFiles directories), drop it onto drives for him, include the project, and then ship it out. From there we just swap Avid bins back and forth. Since all the metadata matches in the Avid media databases we have no issues with relinking. Things just pop on. Of course, this solution is relatively slow (~36-48 hrs to load drives and next-day ship 'em) and somewhat expensive (~$129+ per HDD, plus ~$100-160 to ship) but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Media Composer|Cloud.
VPN to screen share a host machine that has editing software? Essentially your laptop or whatever is a thin client remorely accessing a full workstation.
OR
A VPN to access a NAS storage, using your laptop/whatever as the editing computer with software.
The latter can be setup without a third party service but the former is probably better in terms of not having to prep a set of low-bitrate proxies, and so on.
I use Teamviewer for ScreenSharing. It’s blazingly fast and I have edited stuff remotely with it. It is mostly for smaller things though, as it still does not remotely match the speed and accuracy of sitting in front of the actual system.
Thanks for the info!
Even doing VPN-to-NAS, you’re not going to be too happy. Either you go with something like PPTP or L2TP and don’t use encryption (in which case you’re exposing everything you’re working on to anyone who might be snooping) or you use L2TP/IPsec, SSTP, or OpenVPN and you do use encryption in which case you take a hit in performance from that.
On top of that, NAS protocols (SMB, AFP and NFS) aren’t really designed to operate over high-ping networks with high potential for packet loss, which dramatically degrades their performance. We’ve got L2TP/IPsec in the office and I have OpenVPN at home, and pulling payloads as small as 200MB across that from a NAS is utterly painful.
I just VPN’d in to my home network (50/5) from our office network (25/25) and ran the AJA System Test over it, and performance isn’t all that great. AFP offered better raw numbers than SMB, but it stuttered and stalled out, dragging a 256MB test out for longer than 30 minutes (which averages to about 1MbPS). To top it off it both tests would cause the Finder to freeze up from time to time, and AFP seemed less “aware” of what was going on than SMB (I disconnected from my VPN before ejecting the AFP share, and it took the Finder a while to catch on to the fact it couldn’t talk to it any more).
It’s theoretically possible to make it work, but it ain’t going to be fun, with lots of fits and starts.