Creative Cloud and the future of the creative process

[Mark Dobson]

[Walter Soyka] “”Our plans for Creative Cloud are much greater than the applications themselves. Our vision is to remove friction from the creative process and make it more productive and connected.”

Seems like they are creating a whole lot of friction right now.

Whichever way you look at it this whole CC enterprise is to do with creating a sound business base for Adobe and corralling their customers into a neat line of grateful supplicants.

Any more lofty sentiment towards the future of the creative process are negated by an unfair and topdown approach to their customer base.

“Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose”

[Gustavo Bermudas]

Sounds very nice, but at the end it’s very 1984 with big brother controlling everything you do, the weird thing is that they present it like “freedom” while in reality you’ll become caged in their ecosystem, kinda like The Matrix, we’re now pumping them power.

To be honest, I don’t like the whole cloud concept overall.

[Andrew Kimery]

I’m afraid we are heading towards a gilded cage / walled garden ecosystem problem where Adobe (Adobe Anywhere in conjunction with CC), Avid (Interplay Sphere) and presumably Apple down the line are all coming up with ways to better connect users and integrate products at the expense of letting users easily (relatively speaking) share information across platforms. I know this isn’t a new problem but I feel like as companies integrate more collaborative and metadata-centric features into their workflows the wider the chasm will become.

[Morten]

I wouldn’t mind the cloud subscription based model, if I was able to choose which parts of their software park I want to pay for. Just doesn’t seem fair that the annual fee almost doubles in comparison with the old box subscription model.

Yes I know that if I stop paying it will render my software useless. But I have already learnt the lesson from Apple, and from now on always save an XML along with the project file.

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x Prod. bundle CS6, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Ethernet File Server w. X-Raid…. and FCPX on trial

[Walter Soyka]

[Mark Dobson] “Whichever way you look at it this whole CC enterprise is to do with creating a sound business base for Adobe and corralling their customers into a neat line of grateful supplicants. Any more lofty sentiment towards the future of the creative process are negated by an unfair and topdown approach to their customer base. “

I guess you see what you look for.

Let me give a couple examples (with thanks to Alex Gerulaitis) of business-critical categories that were traditionally handled by perpetually licensed products, but where customers are now choosing the services versions instead because they see real benefits.

Google Apps for Business. Forget Outlook and Exchange or a regular mail server. Gmail can do server-side filtering. It can handle sync services to your device. Third-party developers can hook into the platform to integrate their cloud-based apps into your email. It’s got some of the best spam filtering in the industry, because it can track spam in real time as it goes out to a zillion users.

Salesforce. ACT! and Goldmine used to dominate CRM. How did Salesforce win? Easier scalability and collaboration within a company. Mobile access. Third-party APIs for extension (hook Salesforce and Gmail together!). Better security than most small organizations can muster on their own. Automated updates.

QuickBooks Online. What’s more important to a business than their books? Easy multi-user access. Invoices/sales receipt automation. Delayed customer billing. Automatic daily bank transaction imported. Accept credit cards on your mobile phone or tablet. Third-party extension (hook QuickBooks Online to Salesforce, which is hooked to your Gmail!).

These are all “cloud-only” features by their nature, enabled by connectivity and impossible to do on the desktop alone, and many businesses have found them valuable enough to drop their old desktop products.

They’re also all examples of dominant players in their niches who are nonetheless continuously improving their products, keeping prices stable, allowing third-party access, and making sure customers can interchange their own data.

I’m interested to see what the class of cloud-only benefits by nature for creative pros could be. I don’t mind at all if CC is better for Adobe if it’s also better for me.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Chris Harlan]

[Walter Soyka] “Our plans for Creative Cloud are much greater than the applications themselves. Our vision is to remove friction from the creative process and make it more productive and connected.
“

I tend to like the vision when its hammered out by a standards community like SMPTE or SBE. It can be a bit Borgish when a single entity wants to be the entire process. On the other hand, the slow to sometimes non-existant pacing of standards committees can make simple decisions seem to take a lifetime.

Frankly, I think it makes me much less uncomfortable to think that Adobe just wants to find a way to lock in revenue–which I entirely understand–than to believe they truly want to become the central architecture, plumbing and nervous system for artistic creation in the 21st Century. That notion really scares me.

[Bill Davis]

Not sure if this is the thread you referenced below, Walter. But here’s my take anyway.

I think Adobe’s announcement is a little bit their version of the Apple X announcement just 18 months later. Actually, about 5+ years later (for reasons I’ll mumble about below)

Adobe now says they have to change because the “industry is changing” – which is “duh” worthy for everybody.

But still true.

Apple clearly saw the changing nature of the industry and the fact that the old processes (which traditional NLE software was built around) were going to NEED to change.

I just think Apple saw how MUCH change would be needed, and they saw it earlier. About 5 years earlier. I think that jump was driven by internal Apple understanding of two factors. The continual increase in computing power in smaller and smaller and more affordable packages (where they were a domnant player). And the continual rise of the connected world with everyone who has access to first world technology accepting the need to continue to base both their work, social and personal lives around connected tools. (Apple never really missed the internet like, say MS) And while Adobe didn’t either, their core products (Type, Photoshop, AE, etc while benefiting from connectivity don’t really depend on them like the general computing game Apple and MS have always needed to play)

We can’t know for sure, but it’s likely Randy U and the team vetted some of the basic concept code on would would become FCP-X in the iMovie 08 update in the summer of 2007. Particularly range selection. Yeah, thats probably part of what caused some of the “iMovie Pro” mess, but without real world test opportunities, how does one actually re-invent stuff that masses of people are likely to need to rely on?

If that’s accurate, then they were stockpiling both concepts and perhaps even code nearly six years ago.

In parallel, you have the OS-X transition happening. And Moores Law continuing apace.

OSX was years settling in place and seeing the jettsoning of QT and the rise of the Core Services and AV Foundation packages.

So X was being imagined in a stew of change.

But I thinking literally ALL of this was a reflection of Apple (and likely SJ at the time) being able to imagine the huge changes coming.

Adobe also at least somewhat “re-imagined” their NLE – but always with an eye towards keeping the same primary A/B roll on a horizontal timeline with discrete clips tied to absolute time – concepts. And never really re-imagined many of the fundamentals of the software – but worked VERY hard to make it modern and to take advantage of the new horsepower and new GPU power that was coming on line for Pro Class general computing. Why? Because their core competency isn’t general computing, it’s software. Excellent software, but pertty much software built around the design and graphics industries. They are NOT a hardware company at all.

I’m ignorant of their product lines, and I could be way off base, but I remember people calling revs of Premier, PShop, After Effects, etc. “GREAT” And FAST and have COOL NEW FEATURES but I never remember anyone ever describing any of the work as “Game Changing.” Again that might be my ignorance. But it’s what I recall as an interested outside listener.

So fast forward to today.

What I heard this week is that Adobe thinks the entire game is changing and so it’s time for new ways of doing things. It’s time to break from the past. Re-invent the industry and workflows and how things get done. Their PR effort is wrapping that in “collaboration” – but I’m a bit confused by that. I can see where their products are ripe for “approval loop collaboration” since they’re used in so many creative shops where oversight and approvals are critical. But I’m not sure I see the typical Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom or After Effects user needing the actual production work to be collaborative. It seems to me that from the design of an ad to photo retouching and beyond, these are pretty much expressions of individual creative will. Not so much team sports.

Video editing is different at a large production level. It can be very much a team sport. Often the person working on the video of Project A is different from the person responsible for the audio, so too the color grading and the promo edits and a bunch of other things.

So I’m curious about what parts of the “creative workflow” Adobe envisions migrating to the cloud? With “stream size creep” firmly happening and 4k and 8k on the horizon, collaborative work with FOOTAGE – which is what could help a video type – seems a bit suspect. So Proxies in the cloud shared between editors? Maybe. But if so, then my worry would be if they enable video resources to live in the cloud, then theres absolutely nothing to stop a footage owner from hiring and firing editors at will – since the progress is baked into the cloud version. If Bob the editors gets pissy, just call June and give her the corporate codes to “cloud project” so she can dive in and pick up right where Bob left off – a concept that troubles me since it makes the editor even more a “temp player” rather than a core employee. And that seems a bit scary.

If the “cloud” target is just versioning and approvals – then it’s all just Metadata – and I think Apple has a nice head start since they have their own cloud (iCloud) a sweet metadata friendly NLE (X) and a history of making their bank off solving problems with hardware/software combinations rather than exclusively software licensing models.

After all, they shut down their only real “license” model – iWeb quite a while back. And they appear to be more comfortable with a business model where they encourage demand purchases driven by innovation, rather than contractual billing like the electric company.

Apple is strong. Adobe is strong. But they are two VERY different companies. Apple has always been about innovation and creating hardware and software in the same place to work in harmony.

Adobe has actually ALWAYS been about licensing if you think about it. John Warnock and Charles Geschke originally built the company on the idea of licensing PostScript to printer manufacturers.

So they’re kinda just working back towards their roots here, and I think Apple continues to do pretty much the same.

So far, Apple has been comparatively much stronger at the long game. We’ll see in this iteration.

Those are my initial thoughts, anyway.

FWIW.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Mark Dobson]

[Walter Soyka] “They’re also all examples of dominant players in their niches who are nonetheless continuously improving their products, keeping prices stable, allowing third-party access, and making sure customers can interchange their own data.

I’m interested to see what the class of cloud-only benefits by nature for creative pros could be. I don’t mind at all if CC is better for Adobe if it’s also better for me.”

I appreciate where you are coming from Walter. Could the quote above be applied to FCPX and Apple or the App store?

Are we talking about what you call things? Could the App store have been called the Creative Cloud App store?

I think that Adobe products are truly brilliant it’s only this new business model I object too.

[Steve Connor]

[Chris Harlan] “to believe they truly want to become the central architecture, plumbing and nervous system for artistic creation in the 21st Century. That notion really scares me.”

Never going to happen

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Paul Neumann]

The Creative Suite is so much more than editing/effects and now even so much more than just image creation/manipulation. And so is Adobe. In another comparison to Apple I’d liken whatever product(s) you use and Adobe Creative Cloud to the iPod and the App Store/iTunes. The former is the vehicle and the latter is the ultimate destination.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there that you didn’t even know you wanted or needed. That’s the definition of innovation.