Well yes, that's the point. Instead of building monster desktop machines, you build monster server machines and monster storage arrays, in bulk.

The part you're missing is I need it in my house. I need the throughput.

Here's a calculator. Red Raw, at 4k, is 36MB/sec. If I'm editing, I need minimum 2, more like 4, possibly 6 or 8 streams. Now we're up to 70, 140, or 280 MBPS just to pull the media from the drive to my workstation.

I'm on a pedestrian movie right now. I've got fifteen tracks of dialog. Each one of those is 48kHz, 24-bit... except I'm working at 32 bit FPU. That's 23MB/s before we even get into the beds, the FX, the foley, the music, or any of the rest. My data pathways are such that if I have the video and audio on the same SATA drive I get crunches. This is why I said SAN - because I expected you to notice the different varieties of exotic file transport protocols necessary to make this shit work over distances. Have you ever had to seriously consider a fiber channel card? I'm pretty much there the minute I start moving this shit into another room... and I'm suddenly in the land of SAS drives.

So yes. I know what AWS is. No, it does not work for what we do.

"At least 16GB for compositing?" I don't even know what that means.

Ridiculously overpriced from the point of view of an amateur. My impression was always that the numbers were set to what the market could bear.

We're friends. Which is why I say, with affection, "you're talking out of your ass." I'm not. Don't make us both upset by deliberately misunderstanding things I do for a living to make a point you can't support.