my job as it turns out is relatively simple to do in isolation i can review
scripts with my writers with video chat and screen sharing i can have Yvonne
hold the camera or set up a tripod hey hon and i upgraded to gigabit internet
so that i can quickly beam all the footage back to my office for editing
the problem is over a third of our team has been either
sick there's nobody here or self-isolating over the past while and
working on large video projects remotely isn't nearly as simple as working with
text documents not all of our editors have powerful workstations at home and
even if they did our environment is very collaborative so the whole team needs to
have access to the same projects and files which are stored on our server at
the office so we turned to this
this right here is not my laptop
well i mean that is to say it is my laptop but as you can see i am
effortlessly playing back an 8k video
project even though it's on this wimpy little ultrabook that's because i'm
using a software product called parsec to use the powerful hardware of my
desktop workstation that's over at the office from here at home
it uses the same low latency encoding technology that powers cloud gaming
services like GeForce now and parsec
claims that it can be used for video editing animation and even computer
assisted design or cad so to validate their claims we have spent the last week
experimenting with their software and even using it as part of our workflow
let's talk about how that went and talk about our sponsor freshbooks
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trial at freshbooks.com forward slash tech tips now the paid version of parsec
supports switching between dual monitors and allows administrators to control who
can access which workstations but for our purposes the free single monitor
version works just fine to get set up
you create an account download the app they've got desktop versions for Windows
mac and Linux log in on both machines
the host and the client and they should immediately show up
if they don't you can try manually configuring ports and port forwarding in
the network tab and on your router we never had to though
if you have a fast internet connection immediately increase the bandwidth limit
on the host machine so that's the one that you plan to remote into the default
10 megabit per second has a lot of ugly compression artifacts even at 1080p
also if your hardware supports it h.265 encoding might yield better image
quality but if my experience is anything to go by it might also just give you a
black screen i ended up stuck with h.264
once you're remoted in the interface is shockingly simple you click the little
translucent parsec logo and you can hide it switch to windowed mode chat with
other users who are sharing the session like if you had a friend logged in to
play a split screen local multiplayer game or disconnect
that's it it supports copying pasting text between
the host and client but it definitely lacks some of the other
creature comforts of even older versions of teamviewer i will talk more about
that later where parsec blows teamviewer and most
other remote access apps out of the water though is the experience
now it was built for gamers to use their personal gaming machine as a high
resolution 60fps cloud gaming service
that they can connect to from anywhere and it works really well
my home desktop monitor is a 3840x1600
ultra wide and at max bitrate on a good wired connection i was surprised at how
well it handled things like a wall of scrolling text
my ping time to the office is under three milliseconds though so this is
basically a best case scenario but at 60 hertz i'm getting just about one frame
of total latency including encoding
transmitting the data and decoding it's really responsive
now of course most of the work that i do is in microsoft word where i would have
no reason to remote into a powerful workstation so now let's hear from some
of the other members of my team video editing is what got us interested in
parsec in the first place it's not perfect we average one to three frames
of d-sync between audio and video which makes syncing with the slate and audio a
bit confusing because it might not sound in sync even though the waveform says it
is audio playback through parsec also isn't quite good enough for evaluating
the quality of recording because it adds some compression artifacts but it's good
enough as long as you're just cutting video as opposed to doing audio
restoration visual fidelity is largely good enough but if you have an
inconsistent connection or there are big changes in a scene when you alt tab or
zoom in expand a monitoring window the compression artifacts can take a few
seconds to clear up where we've been really happy is the input lag it's very
close to being right in front of the machine and sometimes i'll forget when
i'm using parsec versus doing things locally while editing like i didn't even
know i was editing at home i just feel like i'm just wearing pajamas and
working at the office there's no difference when it comes to fine detail
and color work compression artifacts can be mistaken for the actual image and
vice versa color bars in particular showed a constant compression artifact
in the red bar parsec suggested super sampling uh running the workstation at
4k and the client pc at 1080p to improve
this but even that will require a final pass for color accuracy here at the
office so we haven't really tinkered with that too much the biggest downside
right now is leg up multi monitor support the pro version supports
switching between two displays but not showing both at the same time so it's
not that great there are some workarounds we could explore like
equipping our editors with extra large monitors for using software like display
fusion or fancy zones to split them up virtually we'll cross that bridge when
we get a little more desperate though for now parsec is working fantastically
for the bulk of our remote editing i love it
the lack of multi monitor slowed me down a little especially when some of the
Windows got lost and i had some performance problems at first but after
switching to a wired connection they mostly cleared up and everything about
using maya felt snappy and almost instantaneous i was still experienced
some latency but it was worlds better than what the wireless connection with
only one real caveat the camera the worse the network connection the
more the camera felt kind of heavy to move especially during whippy actions
like zooms and rotations and also lacks
the snappiness of animating on the host pc directly all in all either wired or
wireless i can definitely say that compared to lugging a eight pound laptop
around i'd much rather use parsec for modeling and animation on the go as long
as my internet connection is good enough so i'm apparently doing the gaming
section of our work from home video because Linus thinks i'm a huge gamer
because i play games on my lunch break
so when i tried out parsec my laptop immediately adapted my gaming desktop's
21x9 monitor to 16x9 and i dropped into
some combat in black mesa which i'm playing through right now on my lunch
break with no issues there was definitely noticeable latency between
flicking the mouse or hitting the trigger and seeing the results but it's
decent enough to play single player games for sure even if competitive
multiplayer is off the table as for my other favorite game rocket
league controller support was plug and play and while a true esports player
would obviously find any amount of latency unacceptable for someone who's
just trying to have a good time it's more than forgivable i did not feel like
it was significantly degrading my performance i spent a bit of time
playing with the gaming features as well and even from a remote location i was
super impressed overall we did find parsec to be more tinkery and less
polished than teamviewer for example it doesn't run as a service so you'll have
to set up automatic login and then like a logout
script or some kind of separate remote access software if you want to be able
to reboot the machine and then parsec back in
control alt i is supposed to be the hotkey for immersive mode but i never
managed to get that to work so i had a hard time sending Windows shortcuts like
control delete and in my humble opinion
two-factor authentication should be mandatory for remote access software
like this also i experienced a couple of just
totally weird complete lock-ups
but for what we're doing there is nothing
quite like it and it's been serving us surprisingly well
and the price is right so hopefully you
guys found it helpful and uh you'll give it a try we're gonna have it linked in
the video description you know what else we're gonna have link
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so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video maybe check out
actually it was a sponsored video but really cool video about shadow.tech
shadowtech has a data center full of virtualized gaming machines which you
could also use as a workstation and you remote into those pretty cool
stuff