Is there a compelling reason encoding needs to be done locally?
The point of encoding is to reduce downstream bandwidth for the viewer, and upstream bandwidth for the distribution network.
The content creator only needs to upload it once.
The point of encoding is to reduce downstream bandwidth for the viewer, and upstream bandwidth for the distribution network.
The content creator only needs to upload it once.
An uncompressed 1080p, 60fps video with 24-bit color depth would need around 3Gbps to be streamed. And even if you don't need to stream it, that would still consume a sizeable portion of the write throughput of the fastest SSDs currently available; if you go up to 4K, you'd actually exceed that by a lot (not to mention, 1tb of storage would last for about 10 minutes of video).
It is not disingenuous given the context. Gp was responding to ggp's hypothetical:
>> Is there a compelling reason encoding needs to be done locally?
I've actually done a version this for some multi-system live AV at an event before. Between the main software mixer workstations at various fields in the event it was a dumb but simple encoding they could do in hardware at a high bitrate and then in the machine compositing for the livestream out it did AV1 software encoding to upload to the streaming site to minimize bandwidth requirement from the venue and maximize quality on the streaming site. We've since upgraded to hardware with AV1 encode though.
The practical downside is AV2 is only providing a 30% advantage over AV1. For the streaming providers their bandwidth costs are pretty cheap compared to revamping the transcoding infrastructure, so it'd probably only make financial sense once the remove end can do the most complex and quality encoding used and the rest are all simpler.
Compressing to AV1/h264/265 etc is really only done for the final version, but that doesn't mean that videos are stored in RAW format during editing, where it is very common to store frames locally in Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD, or some other compressed format that's targeted towards professional editing.
Contrary to AV1 or whatever similar format which offer compression ratios of 1000x and more, these formats have a compression ratio of around 10x. They are very simple, and the quality loss is low enough that it doesn't matter. They also tend to store images with 30 bits per pixel instead of the 24 bpp that's normally used for streaming.
ProRes and the like are used for proxies or quick and dirty productions that are mostly shooting their look in camera because of a fast turnaround time. This is usually event work on a budget or something for social media.
Do you not have 98% high speed 5G coverage?
You also will need _some_ sort of encoding locally before uploading, even if it's minimal, which could lead to issues when encoded again (although there are codecs available to minimize this).
Leaner delivery is not just ethical, but it also makes better business sense.
for other cases, I can just wait more for my cpu/gpu/cloud to do the job