 My job, as it turns out, is relatively simple to do in isolation. I can review scripts with my writers with video chat and screen sharing. I can have Yvonne hold the camera or set up a tripod. Hey, hun. And I upgraded to gigabit internet so that I can quickly beam all the footage back to my office for editing. The problem is, over a third of our team has been either sick... There's nobody here....or self-isolating over the past while, and working on large video projects remotely isn't nearly as simple as working with text documents. Not all of our editors have powerful workstations at home, and even if they did, our environment is very collaborative, so the whole team needs to have access to the same projects and files which are stored on our server at the office. So we turned to this. This right here is not my laptop. Well, I mean, that is to say, it is my laptop. But as you can see, I am effortlessly playing back an 8K video project, even though it's on this wimpy little ultrabook. That's because I'm using a software product called Parsec to use the powerful hardware of my desktop workstation that's over at the office from here at home. It uses the same low latency encoding technology that powers cloud gaming services like GeForce Now, and Parsec claims that it can be used for video editing, animation, and even computer assisted design or CAD. So to validate their claims, we have spent the last week experimenting with their software and even using it as part of our workflow. Let's talk about how that went. And talk about our sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks allows you to quickly manage your invoices, payments, and expenses so you can spend more time focusing on your main business. Try their 30-day free trial at freshbooks.com forward slash tech tips. Now, the paid version of Parsec supports switching between dual monitors and allows administrators to control who can access which workstations. But for our purposes, the free single monitor version works just fine. To get set up, you create an account, download the app. They've got desktop versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Log in on both machines, the host and the client, and they should immediately show up. If they don't, you can try manually configuring ports and port forwarding in the network tab and on your router. We never had to though. If you have a fast internet connection, immediately increase the bandwidth limit on the host machine. So that's the one that you plan to remote into. The default 10 megabit per second has a lot of ugly compression artifacts, even at 1080p. Also, if your hardware supports it, H.265 encoding might yield better image quality. But if my experience is anything to go by, it might also just give you a black screen. I ended up stuck with H.264. Once you're remoted in, the interface is shockingly simple. You click the little translucent Parsec logo, and you can hide it, switch to windowed mode, chat with other users who are sharing the session, like if you had a friend logged in to play a split-screen local multiplayer game, or disconnect. That's it. It supports copy and pasting text between the host and client, but it definitely lacks some of the other creature comforts of even older versions of TeamViewer. I will talk more about that later. Where Parsec blows TeamViewer, and most other remote access apps out of the water though, is the experience. Now, it was built for gamers to use their personal gaming machine as a high resolution, 60 FPS cloud gaming service that they can connect to from anywhere. And it works really well. My home desktop monitor is a 3840 by 1600 ultra-wide, and at max bitrate on a good wired connection, I was surprised at how well it handled things like a wall of scrolling text. My ping time to the office is under three milliseconds though, so this is basically a best case scenario, but at 60 Hz, I'm getting just about one frame of total latency, including encoding, transmitting the data, and decoding. It's really responsive. Now, of course, most of the work that I do is in Microsoft Word, where I would have no reason to remote into a powerful workstation. So now let's hear from some of the other members of my team. Video editing is what got us interested in Parsec in the first place. It's not perfect. We average one to three frames of desync between audio and video, which makes syncing with a slate and audio a bit confusing, because it might not sound in sync, even though the waveform says it is. Audio playback through Parsec also isn't quite good enough for evaluating the quality of a recording, because it adds some compression artifacts, but it's good enough as long as you're just cutting video as opposed to doing audio restoration. Visual fidelity is largely good enough, but if you have an inconsistent connection or there are big changes in a scene, when you alt-tab or zoom in, expand a monitoring window, the compression artifacts can take a few seconds to clear up. Where we've been really happy is the input lag. It's very close to being right in front of the machine, and sometimes I'll forget when I'm using Parsec versus doing things locally while editing. I didn't even know I was editing at home. I just feel like I'm just wearing pajamas and working at the office. There's no difference. When it comes to fine detail and color work, compression artifacts can be mistaken for the actual image and vice versa. Color bars in particular showed a constant compression artifact in the red bar. Parsec suggested super sampling, running the workstation at 4K and the client PC at 1080p, to improve this, but even that will require a final pass for color accuracy here at the office, so we haven't really tinkered with that too much. The biggest downside right now is lag of multi-monitor support. The Pro version supports switching between two displays, but not showing both at the same time. So it's not that great. There are some workarounds we could explore, like equipping our editors with extra large monitors for using software like DisplayFusion or FancyZones to split them up virtually. We'll cross that bridge when we get a little more desperate though. For now, Parsec is working fantastically for the bulk of our remote editing. I love it. The lack of multi-monitor slowed me down a little, especially when some of the windows got lost and I had some performance problems at first. But after switching to a wired connection, they mostly cleared up, and everything about using Maya felt snappy and almost instantaneous. I was still experienced some latency, but it was worlds better than what the wireless connection with only one real caveat, the camera. The worse the network connection, the more the camera felt kind of heavy to move, especially during whippy actions like zooms and rotations, and also lacked the snappiness of animating on the host PC directly. All in all, either wired or wireless, I can definitely say that compared to lugging an 8-pound laptop around, I'd much rather use Parsec for modeling and animation on the go, as long as my internet connection is good enough. So I'm apparently doing the gaming section of our work from home video, because Linus thinks I'm a huge gamer because I play games on my lunch break. So when I tried out Parsec, my laptop immediately adapted my gaming desktop's 21 by 9 monitor to 16 by 9, and I dropped into some combat in Black Mesa, which I'm playing through right now on my lunch break, with no issues. There was definitely noticeable latency between flicking the mouse or hitting the trigger and seeing the result, but it's decent enough to play single-player games for sure, even if competitive multiplayer is off the table. As for my other favorite game, Rocket League, controller support was plug-and-play, and while a true eSports player would obviously find any amount of latency unacceptable, for someone who's just trying to have a good time, it's more than forgivable. I did not feel like it was significantly degrading my performance. I spent a bit of time playing with the gaming features as well, and even from a remote location, I was super impressed. Overall, we did find Parsec to be more tinkery and less polished than TeamViewer. For example, it doesn't run as a service, so you'll have to set up automatic login and then like a logout script, or some kind of separate remote access software if you want to be able to reboot the machine and then Parsec back in. Control-Alt-I is supposed to be the hotkey for immersive mode, but I never managed to get that to work, so I had a hard time sending window shortcuts like Control-Alt-Delete, and in my humble opinion, two-factor authentication should be mandatory for remote access software like this. Also, I experienced a couple of just totally weird complete lockups, but for what we're doing, there is nothing quite like it, and it's been serving us surprisingly well, and the price is right. So hopefully you guys found it helpful, and you'll give it a try. We're going to have it linked in the video description. You know what else we're going to have linked down there? Our sponsor. 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