Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a collection of internet and computing services provided by Amazon. This page discusses services provided by Amazon relevant to Picture-In-Picture video production.

S3

It is highly recommended if you have a distributed video production team that you use cloud-based tools. Sending large video files across e-mail can be very difficult if not costly. S3 costs are incredibly low.

The recommended approach is to setup an S3 explorer like such. For CORS settings use:

    [
        {
            "AllowedHeaders": [
                "*"
            ],
            "AllowedMethods": [
                "GET",
                "HEAD",
                "PUT",
                "DELETE",
                "POST"
            ],
            "AllowedOrigins": [
                "https://s3.amazonaws.com",
                "https://s3-us-east-1.amazonaws.com",
                "https://def-t-show-explorer.s3.amazonaws.com",
                "https://def-t-show-explorer.s3-us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
            ],
            "ExposeHeaders": [
                "date",
                "x-amz-meta-custom-header",
                "x-amz-server-side-encryption",
                "x-amz-request-id",
                "x-amz-id-2",
                "ETag"
            ],
            "MaxAgeSeconds": 3000
        }
    ]

AppStream

AppStream is a virtual Windows desktop. It is a unique service because it provides access to a low-end GPU-driven Virtual Machine. This is useful because you can use existing free desktop software to run processes that would take a lot of bandwidth. It is also useful because the internet speeds of Virtual Machines are significantly better and more reliable than residential internet speeds. Furthermore, it allows you to use low-end computers or phones for filming and a virtual computer to process the video. Uploading will be very reliable and fast.

If you're using S3 for file distribution, AppStream is the best place to process the videos because you pay nothing for downloading the videos (same data centre) and they download very quickly.

I recommend while testing you set your minimum servers to 0 and maximum to 2. If you are running a live stream, such as using OBS Studio, enable persistence so that you can turn it on and it doesn't turn off when you close your tab. For most video processing you should be okay to use the graphics design tier servers with the latest Windows updates. If you're finding you have issues, you can upgrade to G4. However, from experience, CPU > GPU, but GPU is still very useful.