Why the Entertainment Industry Should Care About Pc Over Ip

Film, animation and television industry creatives should take notice: new technology is now available that allows you to instantly share dailies in full HD, work with remote studios or work from home - while keeping your movies secure.

* Keep large video and animation file sets in the server room and off the desktop
* Protect against pre-release piracy
* Enable free seating for creative collaboration

The technology has been available for a while which allows companies to centralise their desktop IT, removing the computers from under people's desks and replacing them with an energy efficient, small, quiet box called a "thin client". A thin client is basically a screen directly connected to the internet.

Remote working

Many companies are choosing this strategy for their desktop computing because of the advantages of centralised management (no more crawling under desks fixing computers), as well as the ability to access a remote desktop from anywhere, allowing for remote and home working.

Technical limitations of thin clients

Hardware manufacturers are well aware of the current limitations of their technology, especially in terms of displaying streaming multimedia. Although standard thin client technology works really well for 90% of the cases where companies need to perform the usual office functions, there are some industries which have had technical issues which prevent them from fully adopting thin client technology. This is especially the case for the entertainment industry, which relies heavily on having instant access to large files of content rich multimedia.

New technology

This is where PCOIP comes in. PC-over-IP is a new technology that allows the desktop computer to, effectively, be moved to a central computer room so that the user only has a "thin client" on their desk. This is the same concept as with standard thin clients. The difference is that PC-over-IP uses a new technology which allows for improved streaming multimedia.

The performance of this technology is impressive. At a recent demo, the author saw a large monitor attached to a thin client the size of a VHS cassette (and mounted neatly to the back of the screen), with 3D animation, CAD imaging and an animated film streaming in realtime from a server in Canada. The one concern is network bandwidth utilisation, and any company considering this technology should make provisions for a very fast network.

This has some massive implications for the entertainment industry.

For animators, this means that remote animation teams working in different continents can now have centralised desktops located at the company headquarters, all working on the same servers and with all data stored centrally - and closer to the render farms.

You can share dailies in HD without file uploads. Because the compression used in this technology doesn't effect the final pixel colour, you can review dailies in native playback.

You can relocate to your home studio. Because the experience of working on this system is just as it would be in the office, you're no longer tied to your desk at work.

---- Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC - Optimising your IT

About the author:

0 comments:

Post a Comment