Working From Home Securely: Live BeBop Demo and Q&A with Brian Bedell

Did you miss the “Working From Home Securely: Live BeBop Demo and Q&A” webinar featuring BeBop’s Brian Bedell (Customer Success Specialist) driving a real-time remote editing session from one of the most unlikely places you can imagine? Here’s another opportunity to catch this webinar, we’ve uploaded a copy of the video here for you!

If you have any questions or would like to find out more about how you can integrate BeBop Technology into your existing editorial or VFX workflow after watching, please click the button below, fill out the form and one of our professionals will help you get started.

Transcript:

Brian Bedell:
I want to welcome everybody to today’s demo. I wanted to first start off just talking about the way that we have to adapt throughout, not just our current situation, but throughout the production industry in general.

Brian Bedell:
This morning I woke up in a unique situation that caused a little bit of a disruption for me. I woke up with my phone about half charged and no lights on, and had to kind of scramble around to see what was going on. It turns out that the power company had turned off electricity to my neighborhood, which obviously presents a little bit of a challenge when we need access to our edit stations, our work, and even when thinking about this demonstration that I was going to put together today, how we would be able to do that if I don’t have any power to turn on my computer.

Brian Bedell:
So, through a little bit of just trying to figure things out, I had moved into my car to charge my cell phone and realized that this is really not as bad a situation as it could be. We’re fortunate with all the technology that we have around us today, and it’s given us the opportunity to be able to do things like broadcast this demo from a car sitting outside. I am currently connected to my cell phone’s mobile hotspot, and I’m getting at least a stable decent connection right now, and I’ve been able to put everything together that I needed to so I can do this demo for you. I’m really excited about this because it shows the versatility of what we’re doing here at Bebop, and how it can help creatives to make sure that we’re hitting our deadlines, that we’re getting our edits done when needed to.

Brian Bedell:
This is very much, the situation that I’m in right now, it’s very similar to a disaster recovery type of situation, but this could also be very applicable if you are on location filming and you need to put together some rough cuts of whatever scene you just shot, just to make sure that the shots work with each other, if you were trying new things. There’s never been a solution as powerful as Bebop that can handle all of these type of adjustments on the fly.

Brian Bedell:
So currently, I’m sitting in my car, as you can see. I am connected to my mobile hotspot. You can see here. And I am streaming a Zoom conference to you and I’m going to… I also got a little demonstration of what it looks like for me here, sitting in the back seat of my vehicle and working on the Bebop Workstation, and able to demonstrate all of this.
Brian Bedell:
So, I’m going to go ahead and close this and I want to just show you guys that this is the power outage that I’m experiencing right now. We’ve got repair crews on the way, estimated 5:00. Obviously that wouldn’t work for you guys, so I was presented with this situation where I needed to find an opportunity and a way to show this, and I’m really excited about this. So, I’m going to go ahead and load up the Bebop client so that I can demonstrate the power of this system. Now I’m running, I think, a 2012 MacBook Pro connected to my mobile hotspot and I’ve just launched a Bebop workstation.

Brian Bedell:
So, I’m going to go ahead and sign in using my Adobe credentials. It just blows me away that when we have these opportunities that showcase… Obviously, a lot of people are working from home remotely right now, but there is a big difference between working remotely and working in the cloud. We’ve all been able to work remotely for quite some time. Working in the Cloud is totally different. If I were to be working remotely, I could potentially use Team Viewer, or Remote Desktop, or something to get into my workstation at my house and show you guys that. But unfortunately since my house is powered down, or if you want to consider my house a production facility, I have no access to that now. So working remotely just became unavailable for me. But what’s great is that my work is in the Cloud, so it’s accessible from anywhere that I can connect to it. And that’s a huge difference between working remotely and working in the Cloud.

Brian Bedell:
So right now what I’m going to do is go ahead and… I’m sorry if I’m stumbling around a lot, or don’t have a very clear train of thought. This is completely unrehearsed, as my presentation that I put together for today’s demonstration was on my workstation at home, which is now inaccessible.

Brian Bedell:
So I’m going to go ahead and load up a project here. I’ve got my shared storage here. I’m going to go to my user folder where I’ve got my project saved and go ahead and launch Premiere. Now this is all being done in the Cloud. All of my footage is in the Cloud, so it doesn’t matter where I’m connecting from and the connection speed isn’t really that important either. So I’ve got this presentation that I’m just going to go ahead and play for you real quick. So we’ve got a little graphic there at the beginning.

Speaker 2:
This is all playing back in the Cloud. Now the first thing you want to do is check out the dropped frame indicator below. If it’s green, that means no frames have been dropped during playback. This is 4K UHD Blackmagic RAW. This is 4K UHD Blackmagic RAW with a [inaudible 00:06:04] applied. And this is a 4K UHD H.264. And this is a four 4K UHD H.264 with a Lumetri color effect applied. Here again is a 4K UHD H.264 with that same Lumetri color effect applied plus a title. And lastly, here’s Multi-

Brian Bedell:
All right, before we let the doctor [commas 00:06:30] continue to speak, I need to just allow for a multicam playback.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. All with H.264 HD clips.

Brian Bedell:
So, pretty cool. Just to show you the stability we’re playing 4k Blackmagic raw. Lots of really great clips there. But what I realized was that I am also teamed up with all my creatives, wherever they are currently. So I saw that when I logged in, I’ve got my visual effects guy [Simran 00:29:26] over here, and I’m going to go ahead and make a couple of changes and ask him to make this graphic that we had better. So I’m going to go ahead and replace this with an After Effects composition. Send it over to him. He’s going to work on his workstation, and make some changes to make it better, and then we’re going to put it back into the cloud. And while we’re doing that, I’ll show you some more parts of the platform if you’re not familiar.

Brian Bedell:
If this is your first time seeing Bebop, I’m sorry, this is not quite the introductory type of presentation that we normally would do. This is more a little bit of advanced feature. I’m getting a FedEx delivery all of a sudden, hopefully they won’t come and start knocking on the window, but I’m sending this from Premiere right now into an After Effects composition. I’m going to save that over so that [Sim 00:29:26] can work on that, and then I’ll go back and make a few tweaks on the premiere panel while he is working on the after effects composition. And then we’ll reload it, and then we’ll export, and then hopefully if we have enough time, we will also send this directly to YouTube. And that’s one of the great parts about the Bebop workstations, is the power that you have at your fingertips can be a lot more than what you’re working with on your local system.

Brian Bedell:
So just a few things while this is loading, some of the best practices regarding… This is obviously not an ideal situation, running from my mobile hotspot into the… Connecting to our cloud through that VM, and I’m also on a laptop, so there are parts of my operating system that could slow it down. So I’ve gone ahead and I stopped Dropbox from syncing. I disconnected from Adobe Creative Cloud on my local computer, so that it’s not trying to sync as well. It looks like we’re having a little bit of an issue getting this project over.

Brian Bedell:
Let’s see. Sorry about that. As creatives, you understand that sometimes things don’t quite go as planned. It’s Premiere that’s not responding. Let me see if I can just force quit this real quick.

Brian Bedell:
And we’ll just reopen that project. Let’s see if it goes through.

Brian Bedell:
So yeah, as I said, best practices. You’ll want to turn off anything that can connect to the internet while you’re trying to work on these workstations. The better the connection that you have, the better the experience you’re going to have. So when you turn off things like Dropbox sync, Spotify, any of those type of connections that will hit to the internet, it’ll help you with having a better performance on the bebop system. The Bebop system is running in the cloud and so you don’t have to worry about the power of your machine, it’s just your network connection, and that’s kind of your lifeline in these circumstances.

Brian Bedell:
So… Oh, well guys, I’m having a little trouble getting this up and running.

Sim:
Hey Brian, I can create a composition from scratch for you.

Brian Bedell:
Yeah, that would be great. I can show you… Since I’m doing a screen share. You know what, why don’t I do an OTS session real quick with you Sim so I can show you… I know you’re on the zoom call, but I’ll use my review and approve technology OTS… Location. So that you can see where this footage was at.

Brian Bedell:
All right. So right now I just connected using our OTS, or over the shoulder technology, and this is built into the Bebop platform. And so it will allow me to show Sim, like he’s viewing my screen right now in real time, but I can show him that if he goes to the default Z drive in my user account, and then B3 and footage, he’ll find both the cloud flight, and the Bebop main logo. And those are the two pieces that I wanted to use with a text layer that says welcome to the cloud.

Sim:
Sounds good. I’ll get it right in about two minutes.

Brian Bedell:
All right, so I’m going to end that OTS session, and that’s how quick it is to use the Bebop OTS, to review and approve. So, if you’re working with a producer that isn’t in your location. If I were to be on set right now, and we were ingesting clips, and doing some quick edits, I could have a producer that is over in New York or overseas, connect to my workstation and view in real time. Not just to look at file locations, but real time playback within the different apps. Go ahead and close After Effects real quick. Let’s see how Premiere is doing. Not responding.

Brian Bedell:
Oh, the life of creatives. Even when we have the best thing, best intentions at heart, sometimes our technology will fail us.

Sim:
I’m ready to go [inaudible 00:13:24]
Brian Bedell:
Sure.

Brian Bedell:
All right, so now Sim is sharing his screen to me.

Brian Bedell:
Hey, all right, that looks great. That’s exactly what I need. Can you, since we weren’t able to compress that into a an After Effects comp in the timeline, can you just bang out a [pro res 422 00:14:15] real quick, and put that on the shared storage?

Sim:
Sure thing. All right. I think you could just bring in the composition into the timeline, it might work as well.

Brian Bedell:
Oh, okay. Yeah, that works too. Okay. So it’s in your VFX project. All right, great. All right.

Brian Bedell:
Mount to that drive, and there it is right there. So I now have access to what Sim was just creating. Let me grab my project and hopefully this will open up…. this time.

Brian Bedell:
All right, so here’s my old layers. And now we’re just going to bring in Sim’s project. Connecting to dynamic link server. So just take a minute, and then here we go. Grab that. You can just drag that right on top.

Brian Bedell:
Oh, I think I may have grabbed the wrong one Sim.

Sim:
That was the right one. Maybe, [inaudible 00:00:16:37], make offline and relink.

Brian Bedell:
All right, we’re going to just connect that real quick.

Sim:
Thing is, your cache is still holding onto the old project.

Brian Bedell:
All right, well let’s remove that real quick, and see if that works. So, despite the problems, it is kind of great that we can still collaborate, and I am still running this from a vehicle in my car… Or running this from my vehicle, on a mobile hotspot. All right, let’s give this a try.

Brian Bedell:
[crosstalk 00:18:24] No. Let’s do that. Should be able to just edit original.

Brian Bedell:
Hmm. So the dynamic link is not updating for some reason. Oh, you know what? I did grab the wrong… It would help if I grabbed the right file. Let’s try this again.

Brian Bedell:
There we go. All right. How are we doing on time?

Speaker 2:
This is all playing back in-

Brian Bedell:
Okay, so there was our collaboration. So now I can… Let’s bump this out and show some of the cool parts about having a workstation that’s cloud based as opposed to one that is onsite or remote, if you will.

Brian Bedell:
Let’s throw this into my file. All right, I’m going to hit save. Start this rendering. And while we’re doing that, I’ll show you one of my favorite parts of being in the cloud. So this is what I always like to say is that these workstations are behind the curtain. So we’re connected to these data centers in parallel with our storage, and we have amazing connections that we don’t normally have when we’re onsite. Even with great business accounts, we won’t be able to attain some of the things that we have such as going up to 1500… 1300 megabytes per second connection downloading. And what’s really important, because I only have about 10 megabytes per second at home upload. So an upload of a large upload can take me all day. Here, I’ve got pushing on 2000 megabits per second. So, pretty cool that we have this available in the workstations. This is just some of the raw power that we have.

Brian Bedell:
So we’re rendering this out right now. We’ve got just under a minute. One of the cool parts that I can show you about the Bebop desktop, or the dashboard, excuse me. So we went over the Bebop OTs, which is our way to review and approve, and collaborate. And you notice that earlier I mounted this project, and this is part of the really cool parts about working in the cloud is that there are lots of different projects within this organization, but my user is only assigned to these three particular projects. So projects is a Bebop terminology for shared storage or mount points. So as you’re working with other creatives, you can securely collaborate with them only with the users that you want to. So you can assign projects to different users and you don’t have to worry about the other users having access to it.

Brian Bedell:
So it looks like premiere is done with its export. I’m going to go in here to my channel, and now let’s grab that footage, and let’s do this upload, and then we’ll demonstrate it on… Good. Yes, it’s made for kids. Why not? And let’s just get it up there quick. All right, so we’re going to be publishing this to YouTube. We are already at 13%, we’ve just got a couple of minutes. And while that’s going… Let’s see. Are there any questions that have come in that I can take a look at?

Brian Bedell:
All right, so we got something in the chat from [Michael Commas 00:00:23:14] saying that it is… We are working off a zoom here and it looks like we haven’t had any questions pop up yet, so… We’re going to let this upload. I’m going to go ahead and save and close out of my project. Excellent.

Brian Bedell:
All right. We’re bumping up to 40%. Little air from Premiere. All right. And if you guys have any questions please pop them into the Q and A right now, or you can hit me up through my email. That was… brian.bedell@beboptechnology.com. If you have any questions about creating cloud-based workflows, or how to change your workflow to be more effective in the cloud. Yeah, I think this is just a quick demonstration of when a situation arises that is obviously unforeseen circumstances, how you can adapt when you have a cloud based production facility. I mean that’s one of the things that was really a game changer for me was with all of the remote editing that I had been doing throughout my entire career, being able to move my production facility into the cloud, and then have access to it no matter where I went. Whether I was traveling to see family, whether I was… I can also take my zero client with me to a production facility and work from an office or a shared workspace.

Brian Bedell:
So it’s opened up a lot of possibilities so that I can focus more on the creative, and not so much on what hardware I need, or what upgrades I have to do. It constantly allows me to be creative and work on deliveries as opposed to working on how to manage my system. And that’s what Bebop offers. It’s a fully managed platform that it’s kind of turnkey. So you can just set it up, you put your footage in the cloud, you get your users on it, and you’re up and running.

Brian Bedell:
So let’s give a look here. All right. And we’ve got 95% processed. Fantastic. And all right, finished processing. So, there it is. Let me see here. Now I’m going to switch back over to my Mac and let’s go to youtube.com, and let me double check. What do we have here? Cloud-based collaboration. I’m not sure if this is going to pop up. I haven’t tested this. Let’s… Here’s my username here. You guys are getting to see whether or not I’m good at… search queries.

Brian Bedell:
Here we go. There’s what we just created.

Speaker 2:
This is all playing back in the cloud. Now the first thing you want to do is check out the dropped frame indicator below. If it’s green, that means-

Brian Bedell:
Fantastic! So there we go. We went kind of full circle with our demonstration, and I’m really thankful for you guys showing up today, and if you have any questions, like I said, let’s hit those up on the email. And with that we’ll… Let’s see. Do we have any other-

Speaker 4:
Hey Brian? Yeah, we do have a question from Chris. Chris is asking, does Bebop intend to support Apple’s final cut? Do you want to take that or should I?

Brian Bedell:
Sure. So the quick answer is not currently, and that’s not so much a Bebop answer, but it is the answer that we’re left with. Apple, Steve Jobs back in the day made it illegal to virtualize the Macintosh operating system. So, we’re not allowed to put a Macintosh system in the cloud. And part of the reason is that the operating system has to run on Macintosh hardware, and because of that it makes it pretty expensive to do. So, there aren’t really any cloud providers willing to front all of that money to run Macintosh. So it all boils down basically to Apple doesn’t allow virtualization of their operating system. So we can’t support any Apple specific apps.

Brian Bedell:
Is there anything else? Let’s see. With OTS can I watch my editor make edits in real time? You sure can. Thank you herb. So the great part about the OTS is that it is 30 frame per second playback with very little to zero latency. So you’re getting really great playback quality, and that way you can collaborate in real time. And that’s really important to have that OTS. Now, it doesn’t allow for screen control, so you can’t take over the mouse. That’s something that as creatives ourselves, we kind of built in that functionality because there’s oftentimes nothing worse than when you have a producer of a particular breed that wants to control your screen, or move your mouse around. But it looks like all of their questions are answered and we’ve hit our time. I want to thank everybody for joining us today, and I’m going to probably step out of my car, and take a little walk. So I hope you guys have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you soon.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]