Working with your HD in the clouds

Posted on 21-04-2009

The Cloud is a term that keeps popping up every now and then, and NO it isn't a fluffy version of the 1982 horror film 'The Thing'. The cloud is essentially synonymous with the Internet. Cloud Computing hence is used to define computing 'on the cloud', where the major part of the work is done on remote servers, and you need only access it as a service on the browser.

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Many services have cropped up recently to take advantage of the scalability provided by such an approach. A new company called 'HD Cloud' have decided to take video encoding to the clouds, by adopting a Software as a Service (Saas) model for encoding. They provide video encoding solutions which “leverage cloud computing to offer high quality, low-cost, massively scalable encoding, engineered for high bit-rate content and large file sizes”.

So what does that mean? Well, for those people who have the talent and skill to shoot / create videos but lack the technical skills or resources to actually get 'out there' in the different formats that are required by different websites / distribution channels, they can handle that for you.

Video encoding for HD output requires massive computing resources, and know-how of the different formats and specifications applicable in different mediums of distribution. For a person who wants to capture his imagination in the best possible way, this means a sacrifice of time and money which would otherwise go in making their work artistically and aesthetically better. For the artistic person who can create masterpiece videos, but breaks into a sweat when he's asked which format his camera records in, this is certainly a boon.