#439 – This wasn't possible until now

What if you could use your local drive for collaborative remote video editing?

As in, another editor, on the other side of the planet could use the footage sitting on the drive on your desk, like it's sitting on their desk. Or vice-versa.

No uploads, no proxies, no transfers, no remote desktop viewing.

Just direct instant access.

That's what Strada.tech just demonstrated live on YouTube.

Strada Agents: What does it do?

Strada Agents enables you to browse and access files on any local drive, anywhere in the world, through the internet.

Ultimately this will allow you to edit remotely without uploading anything.

Or, the next time you export a WiP file for review, think to yourself “One day I won't need to waste time uploading this just to get comments on it.”

Instead you'll just share access to the file that sits on your local drive through Strada and get comments on it there.

This isn't like a remote desktop viewer, this isn't VMware or Team Viewer or something like that.

We're literally doing a transmission of each frame and we're using the internet to move it. But we're not uploading a file which means when I pause it and I go to somewhere else that frame doesn't exist – which for you security nuts is way more secure because there's no additional copies being made.

Strada isn't making a copy, it's just a projection and when the frame is gone, it's gone. There's no file to keep track of or delete or transfer because it's not given to anybody else.

This is a totally totally new experience you just watched it live.

How does it work?

Q. Is Strada Agent compressing at the host and decompressing on the client side?

A. It's all happening on the host side. The host side is decoding the codec of the original file, encoding it and then streaming that result to the client.

So the tax is on the host side which is why it can be a good idea to just set up your Strada Agent as its own computer, connected to a hardline, connected to the drive and it's basically like building your own cloud.

It's your own cloud but it's just a computer and a hard drive and that's it. So it takes two minutes to set up.

Strada Agent is re-encoding each frame of the source material, in real-time and streaming it out at lower bit-rate. With around 200 milliseconds of latency. (Or at least that's what Michael kept exclaiming.)

It does look a lot like magic.

What do you need to make it work?

You don't need a large bandwidth connection as the encoded frames are relatively small at “3-4 mb/s.” For example, Michael was playing back ProRes files (100 mb/s) on a 36 mb/s connection.

It does looks like you will need a reasonably fast computer and fast storage. At least relative to the files you're accessing, in order to create these frame by frame encodes on the fly.

I'm assuming Michael was using an M4 Mac with a Thunderbolt 4 SanDisk RAID.

Why does it matter?

It's a totally different way of technological workflow and it means there's no cost to storage in the cloud... We have no storage cost because the storage cost is the hard drive you already own, right.
So that's a major, major difference.

• Save money
• Share anything
• Edit from anywhere

Why pay twice, and, according to Michael 40x more for cloud storage, when you already have the storage on your local drive.

So maybe you can axe one more subscription from your list.

While it's currently in alpha, eventually you'll be able to use Strada Agents to remotely edit with footage stored anywhere in the world without needing to wait for uploads or pay more to store it on expensive servers.

Strada beta new features coming soon

• Sync by waveform (if enough people ask for it)
  • Apparently sync by timecode was technically harder to implement and Strada already has that.
• Review links
  • Currently Strada offers unlimited users so you can instead just create single-file projects and add the reviewers to that project.

If you want to see everything that Strada has to offer (and it's very cool) then join the free beta and take it for a spin yourself.

Take This Further

Watch Michael's keynote from the FCP Summit which I wrote about here: #436 – Why the future belongs to storytellers.

Watch Michael's (similar but different) HPA Tech Retreat talk, Disruptive Pixels: The Big Power of Small Budgets.

At about 8 minutes into the livestream Michael addressed critical feedback from these talks, including:

• But the Streamers are fine
• There's always an audience for ‘Dune’.
• Aren't the Studio's building more stages?
• Standards & Practices are overinflated

Michael also commented on the demise of Technicolor:

Technicolor is the latest casualty but what you're going to see happen over the next 24 months is overnight you'll be reading an article and a new business that you thought was totally impenetrable and totally safe will actually be announcing a major downsize or a chapter 11 or something like that.