How to turn your hard drive into cloud storage - Strada Agents
in this video we're going to talk about turning your local hard drive into cloud storage with Strata Agents Real quick you're watching BP Land Special thanks to our sponsors Blackmagic View and LucidLink for helping make our NAB coverage possible And now back to the video All right Uh we are back here at Strata with Michael J Good to see you again Good to see you Uh all right so what do we got going on with agents well you know I actually found some of the best technologies are ones that are born out of internal struggles And as I'm getting the bills for these cloud companies that I subscribe to we all have that I was like we got to solve this This agent's idea we had when we started the business we just didn't prioritize it enough until our first podcast We're talking about like eventually you could plug in a hard drive and it'll turn into a cloud So so we finally did it and we we were really excited because the idea is that a cloud is really just your files in someone else's computer M so why can't it be your computer that is the cloud and so we wanted to build a solution that is easy to set your cloud up It's easier to set up your computer as a cloud than it is to sync your phone to a Tesla And would you say it was easy it was very easy Yes I put you on the spot data access Yes it was Uh yeah I click and uh refresh the page and then yeah I was telling Justin like I just stream my files from my other hard drive and it plays back Yeah that's it So you connect the cloud to a strata agent You hit play on the file and you can actually view it anywhere in the world In fact when we say in the world we mean it So you got a computer here in Australia So here we are in Australia This is Mike Seymour from FX Guide and it's his computer It's 9:30 in the morning tomorrow And uh Mike's got a Mac Studio and a hard drive right there Okay And so what's cool about his is I can go in here I can see his Mac Studio I see his hard drive And if I look right here I can see this quickly these files will start popping up And now I'm playing back dailies from Mike's I don't know trip to Japan it looks like walking around here This is all iPhone footage it looks like But we're seeing these files off his hard drive It's not uploaded to the cloud It's not uploading or downloading It's just transmitting it in instantly And what's cool not only is this going 7,500 miles this file is a 38 GB ProRes 4K 444 file So it's a big file And here we can see a 444 ProRes file is too big to play off of internet here We couldn't do that Yeah And the beauty of our system is that it analyzes your internet and will convert the file just in time Yeah We should emphasize how crappy the internet is here all the time So that this is playing back pretty seamlessly Yeah it's really exciting um that we are able to do this and this is sort of the one of the good things about the pandemic is it really helped accelerate the performance of live streaming coding for all the you know streaming telecom products right so we understand that that got really good and now it's really normal What we're sort of doing is applying that technology stack to video on hard drives So there's a connection and a stream So this file isn't coming here We're not actually seeing the ProRes We're just projecting We're making a Zoom call to a QuickTime file and we're projecting the frames here but as soon as I stop the stream it it is there's no file here It never left Sydney Australia in this case And this is using WebRTC to stream the file Okay So and basically you're playing the file on the it's playing the file on the local computer and streaming it That's right In real time Okay Yeah And that's how we can make it happen really fast uh really easily really quickly And the other beauty about this is that we can grab files that are really long So here is the film uh National Treasure And what's cool about this is it's 2 hours and like 10 minutes long something like that So when this file loads we are able to skip around This one's funny because this is actually our hotel room in the MGM So on this one I have the hotel room Boy that window's dirty I've got a G- RAID at the bottom here You can see And um uh we're we're connecting to this drive right there Yeah Yeah So this is hotel internet And now we got the uh now we're playing the file progress off that So we're playing the file Yeah it should be good There it goes So because this is coming from the hotel it's much lower quality because I'm in the MGM hotel because it's also compensating for your source or host internet and the internet here That's right Okay So what happens if multiple cuz with strata you can have multiple people to uh a strata project So what happens if people are trying to access the same file yeah So the good news is right now you're going to all be sharing the same session So if you ask if you if you log in and I log in we're going to be seeing the same session So it's a synchronous experience which is cool but not always ideal So what we're going to be building uh which is coming very soon Let me pause this Here's a little preview So what you can see here is I can see Kira's MacBook Pro and she wants to send this socials to someone else What we're adding in just a few weeks is I can click here I can now invite people So I'm inviting Austin I'm inviting Margot Once that invite happens if I switch to Austin's computer he sees Kira's MacBook Pro She shared me the socials folder Now I can click on those assets and I can download them independently Okay So this is and this is all happening peerto-peer The download doesn't have to go to a cloud intermediary It's just going straight from the computer to your computer That's right In fact if you think about it 90% maybe 99% of file transfers are initiated by the sender Sender has to get all the files together put them in a package send them to someone but the receiver is sitting there being like waiting for that email right to come and get the link What we're doing here is allowing the receiver to initiate their own transmissions which is actually more time sensitive and it's actually more cost effective and time effective because it's just peerto-peer Plus you can view the files you want before you have to commit to downloading them So that's better So I can browse I need this this and this I don't need that and that Pull it over and I have it Today you can access files you can share them It's free and that gives people the ability to try out this new cloud connection What's coming over the next eight weeks is the adding of users and sharing it and then downloading and commenting on those files So that way you can have an agent and you can have three four people all accessing that agent and having independent sessions And with the commenting and the sharing you could also theoretically if you have like an exported cut on your computer share a link and someone could review it and comment on it and not have to go up and back and forth with a cloud That's right And if you think about it you'd be leaving comments on a file on someone else's desk right which is pretty neat You know I had a bunch of colorists come by and they said they really want this They need synchronous review which we can provide and they want asynchronous review which we can provide but they don't want to have to upload every revision to the cloud for the evaluation and get all the notes because there ends up being five six seven eight rounds of that And color colorists are often at the very very end of the schedule where the time is very compressed and they might only have one or two days to get through rounds of review If we can make that faster and you get even one more round in it's a better project Y same with sound mixing same with effects right any art department that's delivering something If a director or producer or decision maker can get one more round in everybody is better off That's an elevator So we believe eliminating the cloud upload and cloud storage If it gives you one more round of review we've made a better project Uh now what about also integrating because I know this is sort of kind of a separate area from what Strata originally has which is with like transcription and uh image tagging Uh where are the two going to kind of like overlap where you can run transcription on the files that are on your computer yeah So we've split Strata into two worlds We have enterprise and we have agents So agents is the the stuff we just talked about be your own cloud Enterprise is so that it's for companies that actually want to push things further where you have time code multicam syncing sound and you have a large library of assets you want to search and collaborate together It's also um we have all of our AI analytics they are analyzed in the cloud because the cloud is scalable So if you have 10 hours of footage we can analyze that really quick If you want to analyze 10 hours of footage on your laptop that could take a while Yeah So we have to slowly move the um cloud enterprise features of Strata into agents and we'll move that feature by feature based on user feedback So we're hoping that the community will start with agents and then ask you know what would be great is I really want transcription I really want facial wreck I really want translation And as we get the order of that we're going to have to host the models at the edge So you can analyze here So the cloud isn't all bad because cloud is scalable right cloud is fast Cloud is redundant When you are your own cloud you lose some of those things but it's nearly free cuz you have the storage you have the hardware you have the internet You bought it once you can use it and you don't have to pay a monthly fee for it Yeah There's no renting right uh renting storage So um these are all components where it's a give and take So I believe in a hybrid future where there is cloud and there's local But I really don't believe that storing all of your original camera files I mean you're shooting this now the chances of you uploading everything that you shoot to a cloud forever is probably zero It's not going to happen We're just uploading proxies to the cloud and it's like yeah no way I'm going to upload Blackmagic RAW files to Blackmagic RAW is always going to be on a drive Yeah But you should be able to access it and so should your collaborators And that's where we believe and we'll add the transcription and the other enterprise features to agents one at a time based on user feedback Speaking of raw is raw supported on agents right now or coming so we don't do raw yet and honestly you can't debear in a web browser Chrome and Firefox Safari they can't debear So it's not purely a strata issue there's a browser issue too Now if we can debayer at the computer side and serve the debayer file we can get that into Chrome So that's where working with raw files at the edge could work So we have a pathway to get raw files to to work in this Um and you could do it on low bandwidth internet because you could debear the file to say a 1080 HEVC and stream that Your debearing though is going to eat up some of your uh ability to do more streams right because a debar is a big task on one computer So it's going to be a give and take And that's where um saving the money and having the power of being your own cloud means you might need to buy the M3 Ultra right and M4 Max and things like that That will help you debayer and do streams in uh greater volume And also these are generating proxies in real time and that's what we've been using in STRA in the past where it's like we just give it the proxies Good cameras shoot two files at the same time and the proxy will get you all the way I love that I have red cameras They shoot raw and ProRes I set the RAW high the ProRes low I'm good to go Yeah uh with your HPA talk about democratizing uh the kind of Hollywood tech how are you what are you seeing in terms of the bigger trend of like what Hollywood needs to do to make their tech and make their solutions more friendly to kind of the content creator space and then the content creator space leveling up basically like YouTube becoming Hollywood before Hollywood becomes YouTube and like what's going to happen first and how is that getting there that's a great question Um yeah I think I think the crux of what I was trying to describe in my YouTube Hollywood talk or uh HPA Hollywood talk was that you have to have a migration path And I think there are companies here I won't name them but you'll know them There are companies here who have anchored themselves into enterprise only And there are companies that are purely retail but the smartest ones know how to have a foot in both worlds And it's okay that they start in enterprise and they have a migration path Here's a good example Sony is awesome at building really high-end expensive stuff and it filtering down to the retail space And you can basically buy a Sony camera for 1,000 2,000 3,000 5,000 8,000 Right It's great 3050 Yeah So that's that's the way to have a migration path Um and then there are companies that uh have really struggled with that and they just say we're going to only serve the top of the top That worked for actually 50 years The problem is for the first time we have seen a major reduction in the top productions uh production quality and the data tells us this isn't my perception the data tells us that trend will continue to decay that the amount of productions at the highest end will only go down and if it levels off it will level off lower than it was in 2019 Mhm So we have a surplus of talent and not enough demand for the content in that space So manufacturers and creatives alike need to sort of reorient themselves to that uh likely fact and make sure that they have a technology migration path to get their tools I was talking to a lens company today that we would affiliate with really high-end lenses and now they're having conversations about how could we adopt our lenses for micro four third cameras and DSLRs and iPhones and this would be a company you would be like they they are going to do a a thing like that but if that brand actually did it you'd want it Yeah Because you be like I could get that brand which has cache on a camera on the devices that I already work with the device I already have that serve the creator economy And so that's where it gets me excited because now the smart companies are starting to think that way How can we build a technology migration path here's another great example Basite about a month ago announced Baslight full for the Mac And now Resolve did that about 12 years ago Baselite did it about 12 weeks ago but that's the move to the technology migration path because now someone that's very Max ccentric maybe they're good at Resolve has an option to explore Baselite which is an insanely good color correction tool And it if you get really good at it it gives you a separate advantage from other resolve colorists For example it can be a competitive advantage So those are all great things where even Basite's showing a technology migration path I think it's brilliant I think it's going to work and I think it'll help take that brand particular and make it more accessible and more knowledgeable in a market that probably never heard of them before Yeah Cuz right now if you search Da Vinci Resolve in YouTube there's about 3,000 tutorials and if you search Basite there's like three Yeah So that's the cool opportunity H we're good All right Mic switch Um last question and because this has now become an annual thing where is your AI your generative AI gauge the the Michael Chney geni gauge um I'm still a fan of Gen AI in its space It has a place Uh but I'm I'm I'm an inreal life guy The my history my experience my knowledge my domain of expertise is all in real life Um and so I'm not like a graphics artist My vocation was not design and graphic arts It was cinematography and editing and color correction And so those are all in real life things So whatever happens in the Genai space which is probably going to um have major major effects in advertising That's where it'll really be the most disruptive is in advertising because Gen AI is really good at montages and advertising is montage right uh so that's where it sort of works Um and high scale personalization or just high scale like outputs fast outputs fast outputs And it's funny the eye is super forgiving in jump cuts in advertising but if you cut a movie that way it would be exhausting right and you it's weird if you think about how your mind calibrates When you see a montage and you recognize it's a montage you even forgive continuity You forgive it Doesn't really matter But in movies you you're like "Wait a minute This isn't that's not the same car That's not the same haircut right that stuff really takes out the suspension of disbelief So this is where uh AI and advertising ha uh Gen AI has a really probably disruptive space I never worked in advertising It's not really my my passion I'm more in uh the the in real life stuff And for me you know when you watch some movies and the first line that comes up says the following is based on a true story it changes how you watch the whole thing Yeah Your mind's like "Oh oh wow Okay this is based on true story." It's possible that there might be the following is shot in real life and we may watch it differently if we know that 10 years from now right because it changes I guess this is going to become a question of suspension disbelief like animation when Snow White came out and it's like are people going to watch Yeah drawings for 90 minutes Yeah And they did And maybe it's another genre Who knows who knows yeah But um I'm all about in real life and I think when you um I think for a lot of people uh that will be fine but it is not it shouldn't be a competition They are going to be different things and Genai will serve the market I think what Avid announced uh at this NAB 2025 they showed a really interesting use of generative AI in in in creating pauses and they showed a new tech where you can have lines of dialogue and they use Gen AI to actually widen frames where Adobe is showing generative extent It's taking the file and lengthening it What A is doing is inserting into the file and widening a gap because you want a pause or you want to reduce a pause and they can combine that or extend that within the clip That to me was a sign of really clever things that editors are always waiting for What we what do we say we say we need that beat Yeah Do we have a take with more of a beat And if you know what I'm talking about you're like "Oh yeah I totally know what that is." And if you don't have the beat now you can generate the beat I like that And I think these are uses of like that people kind of get behind here where it's like AI uses that make problems we had easier Like also Resolve had updates and like you can drag the music out and it'll like kind of extend the music and fill it out and those kind of use cases Um so that's all in real life stuff for Gen AI I think coming back to strata uh agents how is the pricing going to work yeah so we want this to be accessible So agents today is free We are going to keep uh uh the foundation of agents free Connecting drives signing up sharing those files watching them We're not going to charge for that We want people to start to learn to be their own cloud Our commitment to the free is that we want people to sign up do it and give us the feedback on the experiences Then when they say "But now I need it to do X Y and Z." Those add-ons will be what we charge for But we need users not to have a financial barrier for us to be able to capture that because people are not used to being their own cloud People either have a drive on their desk or they share through a cloud We're going to share through a drive on your desk So we got to figure this out as a community because this is brand new tech And uh we want that to be a free experience Cool Thanks Michael Appreciate it And that is it for this video Thanks again to our sponsors for helping make our NB coverage possible And for more of our enemy videos be sure to check out the playlist right here Thanks for watching
2025-04-11 03:55
