Editing on iPad via Jump Desktop
Just wanted to add my experience to the other praise I’ve seen online that is Jump Desktop. Video editors are quick to fall into those niches of conversations about tech hardware that sometimes end up along the lines of: “well you only need to worry about that if you’re editing a lot of video.
To grossly understate it, computer hardware usually compromises between processing power and storage size. My needs typically lean more towards storage size. I more often need to have multiple or dozens of terabytes ready to access rather than an extra GPU.
All that to say, I’m growing more and more fond of having a dedicated workstation and finding more convenient means of accessing it. And I finally had a use case to test out Jump Desktop on the iPad.
I’ve used Jump Desktop on…the desktop, for about two years now, and most of the time I forget that I’m on a remote machine. I’m not totally sure how much having wired connections at both ends helps since that’s how I typically use it, but it obviously doesn’t hurt. The hardest thing about it is having to reference something on your local machine and getting your keyboard back is kind of annoying. This is the main reason I’ve come to be a side-screen dock person.
I have tried Parsec and even Chrome Remote Desktop in the early stages of the pandemic, and with Parsec I could still feel the lag reminding my I wasn’t on my machine. If anything Jump Desktop will degrade the video quality before introducing lag.
The iPad experience on Jump Desktop is really seamless. I just logged into my account and my remote machines were ready. What really impressed me (and led me to write this) is the input interface. There are several ways to send input commands via an iPad to a desktop machine, but my favorite is Trackpad mode. This turns the entire iPad screen into a trackpad and then common (I’d even say natural) touch commands translate seamlessly; tap with one finger to click, tap with two fingers to right-click, two-finger drag to scroll, double-tap and hold/drag to drag. It was like once I found trackpad mode, my hand was on the remote machines mouse.
Keyboard input is obviously limited, when using just a naked iPad. But, I feel like if the right scenario presented itself and I had to, I could get real work done with just an iPad.
Waiting for the train
And the icing on the cake for me, was that my first time using the iPad for this I was also tethered to my phone on a bus. It was one of the few “other-worldly” experiences I’ve had with technology where I had to stop and (take a photo) assess what was really happening. (Photo taken at the train stop.) Bear in mind this is a circa 2021 baseline iPad, stuffed to the small brim of its embarrasing 32GB of storage. This is not a performant machine, but I am easily manipulating hundreds of gigabytes of 4k 10bit video.
And there’s so much more Jump Desktop is doing behind the scenes; screen resolution controls are so smooth you actually want to try fine tuning it.
So yes, I do recommend Jump Desktop for video editing.
EDT: Aaaaand jump desktop just announced 4:4:4 10-bit option in beta, among other great features like doing this all through a web browser.