This is a pretty common problem with all true workstation level computer systems. It's like taking a rack from a data center and putting it in your office. You've got a dozen or more spindles and fans spinning. I've seen systems with $200,000 worth of RAM in them, but that was back when 256 GB of RAM was $100k. And, yeah, they had 15k SAS drives. If you think servers are expensive, you've not priced workstations.

Every time I've seen higher end workstations, the actual workstation itself was always in a separate room, and there's been some kind of remote KVM solution used. The workstation was always very noisy and generated a lot of heat. It's also just... a lot of money to shove under a desk where people kick it all afternoon.

A number of manufacturers offer soundproof 19" rack enclosures, but they are heavy, bulky and not especially cheap.

https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/24u-ucoustic-soundproof-s...

Not exactly sure how that compares, but I bought one of these quite hopefully: https://www.apc.com/us/en/product-range/203414049-netshelter... and "soundproof" means my home office doesn't sound like sitting on a subway train, and more like the inside of an airport.

I have one of these, they are quite effective.

Still a long way from what I'd call soundproof.

Indeed. But the equipment inside has fans and must move air around. The enclosure is most effective at high frequency noise and so what's left is much more tolerable (and reduced). I suppose you'd need to go to liquid cooled to do better? Or are you aware of a more effective enclosure?

> you'd need to go to liquid cooled to do better?

I'm afraid of trying something really invasive like liquid because I live in Portugal and getting weird stuff takes forever.

> Or are you aware of a more effective enclosure?

No I don't really: I have some heavy blankets hanging which helps a bit. My musician friend told me I should glue some egg cartons to the blankets, so I'm going to try that soon.

I do I.T. for a small broadcast studio (it's actually a sports venue, but they have their own production and broadcast studio), and it is indeed still very much like this. We have rack-mounted workstations alongside all the servers and networking, with KVMs to the next room where the production is handled. This was all spec'd and built out in 2019.

By KVM, do you mean actual cables for keyboard, video and mouse going from the workstations to the user, or some kind of remote desktop tools?

This is a tangent but what was your journey into VFX?

I studied digital media in uni. But I had been using linux since about 1999.

I wanted to be a compositor, but failed the rotoscoping test at the company I was working at. So I fell back on my technical skills, and became an infra engineer. I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it.

> I left VFX in about 2015, and sadly no matter how much I want to go back, I don't see much of a future in it. GenAI is really going to do a number on it.

I don't think Generative AI will make entire industries disappear, but rather make people within those industries do more with less. Seeing as you somewhat see what future of the industry is, and assuming you're right, it puts you in a good position to gain the skills you think will be sought after. You have the technical skills too seemingly. Just an idea, I'm not working in either areas so take it with a bit of salt I suppose.

Did y'all run the remote desktop over specific networks?

for VFX, disney/marvel/fox/sony required that the entire network be air gapped, with really stringent rules on USB, data tracking and interchange. All internet access had to be done via RDP with copy/paste blocked.

Had sony bothered to follow it's own rules it wouldn't have been hacked and had all its data leaked in 2014.....

But to answer the question, we had a shit tonne of networking, so as far as I'm aware it was just on the vanilla network. Might have been a seperate VLAN though.

Why can’t you just run a longer cable into a temperature/noise controlled room nearby?

Good question!

So there are a couple of options, depending on the hardware. If it kicked out HD-SDI you could just patch the display into the coax in the building and have done with it.

But that only worked if you were in the same building and your machine kicked out HD-SDI

Most machines either shat out dual-link DVI or worse, some custom shit. Getting a cable that can reliably transport dual-link DVI >10 meters was difficult and expensive. Worse still, it had a habit of dropping back to single link, or some other failure mode that was everso annoying to debug. More over, 10 meters often isn't far enough. Especially if the room had a projector (so might be >5m long throw.)

Now, thats the simple case. The hard case is multi-building. Say, you have an operator working in london, and the director in new york, you want to give them the highest quality picture possible. The only way to do that at the time was with one of these cards, or some nasty SDI-hardware h264 transcoder (hugely expensive at the time)

I really wish I could remember what they were called. They appear to have fallen out of favour.

Now, you'd just use cynesync, as you're laptop can encode video in real time now (https://www.backlight.co/product/cinesync) Also, rumour has it that the wolverene movie was leaked because a producer got coked up and left an unencypted laptop on a plane, rather than using cynesync to show an edit to someone important. Alas I can't verify that.

Were they Teradici cards?

YES

thats the one! many thanks

I'd love to hear more stories about coked-up producers in the film industry from 15+ years ago. Having done technical codec work adjacent to some of it in the past, it's a wild business to be in.

> Say, you have an operator working in london, and the director in new york, you want to give them the highest quality picture possible.

This is exactly the insight I was hoping for. Thank you.

Based on the comment of 15k spinning drives this must have been quite some time ago, but there's very definite reach length limits on DVI and displayport cables. Let's say this was in 2007 and the maximum state of the art was a dual link DVI 2560x1600 display, you can't extend that in any practical way beyond about 15 feet. Extending USB keyboard and mouse by comparison is trivial. Unless all of the desks and workstations were set up directly on one side of an acoustic barrier wall, a hard problem to solve.

> you can't extend that in any practical way beyond about 15 feet

For passive cables, that makes sense. But with repeaters, wouldn't you be able to go further? Maybe cable repeaters like that are newer than I imagine.

I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable for connecting my PC to my TV. It said it was UltraHD rated, but could never get it to work reliably beyond 1080p.

> I bought an expensive 10m (30ft) active HDMI cable

I think what I was referring to are repeaters you put between cables, that amplifies the signal. You connect that device between two HDMI cables (say 5m) + connect it to power for it to actually extend the distance the signal can travel.

I'm not sure what an active HDMI cable would be, maybe circuitry inside the cable that draws power from the HDMI port?

> maybe circuitry inside the cable that draws power from the HDMI port

Pretty much:

https://www.cablematters.com/Blog/HDMI/how-do-active-hdmi-ca...

Perhaps they're better now but, yeah, for me it didn't work out as intended.

I've not had any issues getting full bandwidth (4k60hz) from my active HDMI cable.

Also I believe there are displayport cables that do the data transfer over optical fiber for long runs as well.

Sounds like hocus pocus to me (like gold plated connectors), maybe you get like half a meter of extended distance or something with those? If I had to I'd go the repeater way (or as others mentioned: fiber, but sounds expensive and not maintenance free)

I think "active" HDMI is similar to the expensive USB3 cables, which are basically fibre optic cables in disguise

https://www.chargerlab.com/the-way-to-metaverse%EF%BC%9Ftear...

You need fiber for that -- I have a pair of them (100' to my desk, 30' to my TV), and they've been rock-solid for 4 years.

So the issue was more that dual-link DVI was very rare, and getting hardware to encode/transmute it reliably and at high bit-depth was almost impossible.

By about 2014 hardware encoders were good enough to send decent quality video over gigabit.

Somehow those didn't show up on my searches, though it was a few years ago.

Thanks though, will keep it in mind. These days Steam Link is decent enough for what I wanted, but ya never know.

You can, and people do.

There are a slew of HDMI extension systems, some that even use ethernet with hardware encoding/decoding. Grandparent commenter hasn't worked in the industry in at least a decade if they're talking about DVI.

In a modern video editing system it's still a non trivial challenge, because you can't just go using any COTS HDMI extension system, which might be good for 2160p30 at 420 color space, or maybe 2160p60 at 420 color space, but may NOT be capable of 2160p60 at 422 or 444 color space. Or may not function for DCI resolution at 4096x2160. Or anything 8K.

There's plenty of HDMI2.0 compliant "video over ethernet cable or fiber things" which are the ordinary COTS products that may not be sufficient for serious video editing needs.

People on video editing workstations these days are using higher end monitors that can be trusted to work in 10bit color and to match a certain color space grading.

On the other hand it's a lot easier these days to have a relatively quiet video editing workstation that has 8 to 16TB of local, pci-express bus attached NVME storage for work space, and that same workstation can have a not-very-expensive 100GbE NIC in it attached to some large/noisy storage elsewhere.

These days, if you're just wiring to a single workstation in a nearby next room, 50 meter active optical Thunderbolt 3/4 cables can carry 5K+ DisplayPort video passthrough and data from your USB peripherals.

(It's "passthrough" and not "uncompressed" because DisplayPort may use DSC depending on the resolution and frame rate.)

US$500 for an optical cable can be a lot cheaper than paying for HDMI extender sender and receiver boxes.

> some that even use ethernet with hardware encoding/decoding

We had those, the problem is that they loose bitdepth. They were also fucking unreliable. We had a lot HDMI extenders and they worked for 1920x1080, and sometimes 2k if you were lucky.

we used them for the "prosumer" LCD projectors we had the in the review rooms. They didn't work so well for the massive christie projectors. (I seem to recall they abused 3g-SDI to get resolution)

Guys c'mon... The desk is set dressed. Nothing in the photos makes any sense. Last of all, Geoffrey Richman isn't doing editing work in Ben Stiller's apartment.

> Geoffrey Richman reviews season two finale footage. In his at-home edit bay (not pictured), he works on iMac, which remotes into a separate Mac mini that runs Avid from a post-production facility in Manhattan’s West Village.

Yeah. That would be a horrible experience.

One director had their sofa shipped into the Digital-intermediary room (it had a 2k calibrated digital projector) for 4 months. An artist has got to be comfortable....

Probably Miranda. Brings back a lot of memories from the flint/flame/inferno days. I remember buying a tezro for ~150k USD in 2005/6. We also were "gifted" an Inferno around that time which I heard originally cost multiple hundreds of thousands. When it showed up it was the size of a refrigerator and took dual 30A power feeds. Sounded like a jet and didn't last long.

Teradici came on the scene and started running everything over IP. Hardware at first (old EVGA pyramids were everywhere) where you had to route the video out into a custom card that then put out the signal via IP.

Now it's all software with the leaders being teradici (merged with HP anywhere which came from IBM), nicedcv (Amazon), parsec, and a few others.

The big advantage in content production over something like vcn/rdp was color fidelity, local cursor termination, and support for hardware like Wacom tablets. You can even do 7.1 audio and multiple monitors. Turns out when you are an artist having a local like feel is incredibly important. 60fps is 16ms per frame. So even with virtual workstations on AWS you want to deploy them in a region that is relatively close to the end user.