How we're editing videos on low-spec computers... FROM HOME! #stayhome #withme

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 ultra book 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 talked about our sponsor fresh books fresh books allows you to quickly manage your invoices payments and expenses so you can spend more time focusing on your main business try their 30 day free trial at fresh books comm 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 setup you create an account download the app they've got desktop versions for Windows Mac and Linux login 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 go 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 loaded 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 we're 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 38 40 by 1600 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 members of my team video editing is what got us interested in parsec in the first place it's not perfect we average one two three frames of desync between audio and video which makes syncing with a 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 epic recording because it had 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 we need alt tab or zoom in expand the 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 I'd even know off sitting 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 parsecs suggested super sampling running the workstation at 4k and the client PC at 1080p to improve this but even that will require a final pass for a 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'd love it the lack of multi monitor slowed me down a little especially when some of the windows go 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 world's better than what the wireless connection with only one real caveat the camera the worse than network connection the more the camera felt kind of heavy to move especially during with the 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 I tried out parsec my laptop immediately adapted my gaming desktops 21 by 9 monitor to 16 by 9 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 result 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 tinkering 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 controlled 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-alt-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 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 down there our sponsor privacy is a free service that allows you to generate virtual credit cards for 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nothing it's privacy com forward slash Linus that's privacy com /vy Ness 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 shadow Tech 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

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,519,111

Keywords: parsec, remote, gaming, work, software, pandemic, stay home, with me, #stayhome, #withme

Id: B821HqH-dWI

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dnacore]

This is a very nice exposure! Hopefully parsec team will add the things that Linus mention like dual-monitor support and 2fa for better experience.

[u/Wildcard36qs]

Yea, I have been singing Parsec's praises for a long time now. It is definitely the best for me out of all the remote services that I have tried.

[u/2vockshakure]

I am currently using Moonlight and really happy with the performance. Can anyone post their experience with Parsec vs Moonlight?

[u/sunkast]

Tried this out today and the performance is great. But as far as I can tell there is no clipboard sync. Unless there is a way to have bi-directional copy/paste this is a total deal breaker.