Streaming

Collaborative Post-Production with Avid Media Composer

SUMMARY

At Dolby.io, we’ve just released SRT as a supported ingest protocol for our Real-time Streaming product.  We can take in an SRT feed and re-broadcast it as native WebRTC to be played back on any browser or device without the need of any specialized hardware of software.  By putting together the power of Media Composer’s SRT feature with the speed and compatibility of Dolby.io, collaborating remotely for an edit session is as simple as sending a URL for our hosted player.  Now you can collaborate with teams large or small in real-time with amazing quality. 


Over the last couple of years of figuring out how to work remotely, we’ve seen some creative problem solving from the Post-Production community.  Working together to remotely collaborate was a hard problem to solve.  We saw organizations attempt to send video feeds through traditional web conferencing services via a screen share with choppy frame rates or try to share with higher-latency approaches where the video delay became too much to collaborate in real-time.  All-in-all, this was a lousy experience and there wasn’t a great end-to-end solution. 

Dolby.io’s Real-time Streaming Solution 

We saw a big uptick in demand for re-creating the over-the-shoulder collaborative sessions that used to be done in-person.  The requirements for such a workflows are: 

  • Speed: Real-time video streaming with the lowest latency possible (sub-second) 
  • Compatibility: No special hardware or software needed for playback, any browser, any device.  Ideally this would work on consumer grade hardware/software 
  • Ease-of-use: The solution needs to be simple to use and reliable.  It needs to “just work” 

For these reasons, many of our customers adopted the usage of our OBS WebRTC software for connecting and streaming out a broadcast-quality NDI feed in real-time to browsers and this workflow is still widely used today. Check out Braden’s blog post on using WebRTC in OBS for Remote Live Production, which utilizes a similar workflow.

Avid Media composer working alongside the Millicast Publisher in browser.

What’s Next 

As people begin to return to the office there are certain parts of remote collaboration that are clearly here to stay, for both newsrooms as well as traditional posted content.  What does the evolution of this workflow look like?  In May, Avid announced that Media Composer was support for the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) streaming protocol.  SRT is becoming the replacement for the legacy RTMP protocol for contribution with its low-latency, support for multiple codecs, open-source code base, and wide adoption.  While it’s not quite as fast as native WebRTC it is still possible to achieve sub-second latency. 

At Dolby.io, we’ve just released SRT as a supported ingest protocol for our Real-time Streaming product.  We can take in an SRT feed and re-broadcast it as native WebRTC to be played back on any browser or device without the need of any specialized hardware of software.  By putting together the power of Media Composer’s SRT feature with the speed and compatibility of Dolby.io, collaborating remotely for an edit session is as simple as sending a URL for our hosted player.  Now you can collaborate with teams large or small in real-time with amazing quality. Check out our blog post to learn even more about broadcasting SRT streams using Dolby.io.

Here is what the simplified workflow looks like: 

To configure Avid Media Composer for streaming with Dolby, take the following steps: 

  1. Create a Dolby.io account and head to the Real-time streaming dashboard 
  1. Create a publish token or use the demo that is created for you 
  1. From the API tab within the token, you will find the SRT publishing details 
  1. From Avid Media Composer, right-click on the HW/SW button just above your timeline 

  1. From the context menu, configure SRT 

  • Add the “SRT stream ID” from the publish tab of the streaming dashboard as the “Stream Name” field 
  • Set the SRT Mode to “Caller” 
  • Add the path portion of the “SRT publish path” (without the srt:// or port number) as the “IP Address” field 
  • Add 10000 as the “Port Number” 
  • There is no need for a password 
  • For latency, you can play with this number but we found 100ms to be a good tradeoff for speed and quality in our testing 
  1. For quality, refer to to the Avid knowledge base article.  For most use-cases, Medium (10-30 Mbps) or Low (5-15 Mbps) will be sufficient. 

Sharing

When it comes to sharing a link or stream, it couldn’t be simpler.  You can utilize our hosted player to simply send a link. 

 

  1. From the streaming dashboard, navigate to the API tab of your publish token 
  1. Select the “Hosted Player” URL  
  1. Send the link 

It is really that easy, it will work on any browser or device!  You can of course utilize our advanced features such as stream protection and build entire applications around this workflow.  We have many APIs and SDKs available for customization. 

Playback with Hardware Devices 

Apple devices have become popular for monitoring feeds due to their incredibly high-quality screens.  We’ve recently published a stream-monitor app for tvOS directly in the app store for those who want a simple solution for high-quality playback on a hardware screen or monitor.   The code base is open and available for you to customize your own app or you can use ours off-the-shelf to get started immediately.  Support for iPhone and iPad is coming soon. 

Conclusion 

The pandemic has forever changed our lives and the way that we work.  Embracing the best parts of what we learned along the way is improving our ability to work and collaborate remotely without sacrificing quality.  This is leading to a boost of operational efficiency, employee happiness, and productivity.   

At Dolby.io, we are working on the evolution of what simple, cloud-based workflows look like and the underlying technology that powers them. 

Dan Coffey

Senior Product Manager, Streaming

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