Working from home is great but poses problems when you decide to do some home remodeling. What I thought would be a two week inconvenience has turned into a two month ordeal as my office has been relocated to the kitchen table. Over the weeks working from a wooden chair has my back longing for the comfort of my couch. Also, plugging my laptop, hard drive, and other accessories into a power strip, and then draping the cords over chairs and across the floor to the nearest outlet, got me thinking that the portability I should have in a laptop didn’t stack up to TV commercial claims. There had to be a better way of doing this. That’s when the seed of a wireless network finally started to germinate in my brain.
I’m no networking genius and I’ve never had the need for a wireless network, so I began researching some of the equipment I already own to see where I stood. The first thing I checked was the Apple Airport base station in my office. A brief look at the base station revealed a USB port on the back. I had no idea what this was for, so instead of hunting down the manual I never read, I looked it up on the Net. A quick Google search took me to Apple’s website and right there on the front page, to my utter amazement, were the words share a hard drive. I was stunned. I had no idea the USB port existed for that purpose, so I swore an oath to myself to read the instructions of future electronic purchases more thoroughly.
I immediately disconnected the 2TB hard drive from my computer and connected it to the base station. With absolutely no effort my laptop discovered it and I was freed from the burden of a few cables. This hard drive contains all of my client projects as well as frequently used files, stock footage, and images. I was wary about running an After Effects project solely through a home wireless network, but found that it was quite stable. I had no trouble opening projects and working with them. The only thing I did notice was a significant lag when opening and viewing Quicktime movies. In those cases I found pulling them down locally to work with was best.
Overall it was pretty cool, I used the hard drive this way for a 90 second info graphic project I was working on, without a hiccup. I even found the new configuration had no trouble transferring the completed project to my FTP for client download.
According to Apple you can also use the base station to access the drive remotely via the internet. Just knowing I could leave my drive at home and have access to all of my design elements remotely is really exciting.
This experimentation with the hard drive got me thinking of other ways to streamline my workflow, and while sitting on the couch watching TV and browsing Facebook on my iPad, I had an idea. Would After Effects work on my iPad? Another Google search and 5 minutes later I found the Air Display app. Air Display is available as a download on the App Store and costs $9.99 at the time of writing.
Air Display is described as an app that allows you to use your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch as a wireless display extending your computer desktop. As an experiment I downloaded the app, followed the instructions and within moments had After Effects “running” on my iPad. It was completely impractical of course, the iPad’s screen is far too small to effectively use After Effects this way.
Not to be deterred by the lack of screen real-estate, I decided to step it up a notch. By turning on my Apple TV I was able to use my iPad as an intermediary to broadcast my desktop to a 52 inch flat screen tv, and with a wireless Wacom pad, lounged on my couch creating some simple animations.
There was a significant lag when performing actions but the potential with a future version of the iPad and a faster network connection really intrigued me. Who knows, maybe it will happen. Getting paid to lay on the couch would suit me just fine.
What do you think? Any time saving ideas using wireless networks? Any problems with them? Please share.
7 Responses to this post
February 28, 2012 at 9:04 am |
Hey Sean;
Great find! I use a PC so I use an app called SplashTop. It allows you to connect your IPAD as a second screen. It mirrors everything on your base screen remotely.
As you mentioned the lag makes it impractical for actual compositing but works well for monitoring renders, checking e-mail, Twitter, or (if you own a Canon DSLR) you can set up your IPAD as a remote shooting system by loading the Canon EOS Utility on your main system. Works great if you are shooting alone.
Thanks for sharing!
Steve
February 28, 2012 at 10:33 am |
Awesome suggestions Steve. I’m holding out for the mythical Canon 5D MkIII. If I end up with one I’m definitely trying that out!
February 28, 2012 at 2:56 pm |
Sorry Steve but this sounds like a very impractical way to work.
Why not transfer the project to the hard drive of the laptop?
Yes you might have to delete some songs from your iTunes library to make some room or maybe move an iPhoto picture library but this seems much more practical that working in AE wirelessly.
As a matter of fact you should probably move your entire iTunes library to the drive that is connected to the Airport. Streaming MP3s over wifi is a lot less taxing than doing an AE render. Plus every computer in the house would have access to the common iTunes library.
As a freelance editor and animator I usually have at least two active projects on my laptop drive. They usually start at my desktop workstation. If I need to work on them more or if I need to make a quick client change during a day when I am booked on a location edit, I will copy all of the graphic elements, project files and Premiere media from desktop to my laptop drive so I can work while I’m sitting on the train. I keep the project files and elements stored in a dropbox so when I come home and sit in front of my desktop computer I can pickup right where I left off. And if any computer crashes I will never lose an active project file because its backed up in the cloud. The large media files that I need for editing always exist in more than one place with this method.
With larger projects that involve a lot of media there might be a need for an external FW drive. But the small OWC On-The-Go bus powered FW800 drives work great. They are small enough to sit under my laptop between my legs while I’m on the train.
Lou …
February 28, 2012 at 4:01 pm |
Hi Lou. Thanks for the response. I’m not trying to suggest that running AE solely through wireless network is the most practical method of working. I did it as an experiment to see how far I could push After Effects and this network. I was surprised at how well it did. By doing this I found some of the limitations and some things that could make my life easier in the future. For instance, I like the idea that I can keep all of my bulky folders containing gigs and gigs of dust, particle effects, explosions, vector shapes, loops, etc. on a drive that I can access regardless of my location. I can easily look up a thumbnail example of a piece of footage and pull it down locally to work with wherever I am be it my kitchen or the local coffee house. I think that’s pretty cool. Oh, and I do have my iTunes library on it. Great suggestion, I can bump tunes anywhere in my house just using my iPhone.
February 28, 2012 at 11:49 pm |
Log Me In is another useful app for remotely controlling other computers through your ipad, worth checking out!
February 29, 2012 at 2:11 am |
With OS X Mountain Lion we should be able to stream your Mac to your Apple tv directly. So no more routing from a computer to ipad to tv!
http://hashtagnerd.com/tech/os-x-mountain-lion/
March 3, 2012 at 11:08 am |
Hi all,
I use TeamViewer to access to my computer with my iPhone 3GS.
I click the Render button in After Effects and then I go outside, take a walk, drink a coffee, make some shopping, or whatever I need to do.
Then I connect to my PC or my Mac with TeamViewer from my phone to check if the render is finished or not / crashed or not…
And I can decide to spend more time outside or come back to my home to continue my work.
Yesterday, I used this technique to scan some films and photoshop them from the waiting room of my dentist !
I just put the films in the scan, pressed the “Scan” button (very long operation, 2600 dpi for 24 pictures) and went out to the dentist.
It’s a free software available here http://www.teamviewer.com
Don’t hesitate to test it !
Flo
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