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OT: Adobe’s Colaborative Workflow Concept (at NAB)
After reading a variety NAB summaries from around the web, I didn’t come across anything (I probably missed it) on Adobe’s Technology Sneak Peek: The Future of Collaborative Editing presentation that they showed during NAB.
Adobe showed off what they referred to as a Sneak Peek at a concept for a collaborative workflow at NAB this year. What they showed was not part of any existing or announced product. It’s not in CS6. They stated they had no plans for it, they just wanted to share the concept. The concept was a approach to a collaborative workflow for editors using Premiere Pro.
The demo consisted of a special build of PP. Launching this special build immediately brought up a login in window. You entered in a server, username and password.
The server basically showed up in PP’s media browser. The presenter simply dragged some clips from the server into a new Project. The clips didn’t transfer, they are simply pointers to the actual media which reside on the PP server that he logged into.
He could play and pause any of the clips and they looked okay. What the server did was it streamed the clip to his computer. When he hit stop, the server then transferred one single frame in full resolution.
He dragged some of the clips on the timeline. Made a few basic edits and then saved the Project back to the server.
He then brought up a video chat with another Adobe person, who was apparently in Seattle. That person opened up the newly saved project, applied some additional edits and saved it. The presenter was then able to open the project and see the new edits.
It appeared to me to be an interesting concept. So I was wondering if anyone at NAB had seen this presentation and what they thought of it.
Although, I don’t know why Adobe would show something like this in a public forum. I can understand the importance of getting customer feedback. I’m not sure why they would not do it under an NDA and in front of all your competitors.
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10 Replies
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[Kevin Patrick] “I was wondering if anyone at NAB had seen this presentation and what they thought of it.
“I don’t know if that particular one was shown at NAB, but they did show other clips about things in development at Adobe Labs that are not yet on the market. I know, because I saw one.
[Kevin Patrick] ” I don’t know why Adobe would show something like this in a public forum. I can understand the importance of getting customer feedback. I’m not sure why they would not do it under an NDA and in front of all your competitors.”
If memory serves, Dennis Radeke of Adobe has very kindly pointed the way for us to several of the Adobe Labs future-looking projects. Rubadub was one of those, and it was very cool. Adobe does this kind of thing as a way to differentiate themselves from their more secretive competitors, and it works, because here we are talking about it.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[David Roth Weiss] “I don’t know if that particular one was shown at NAB”
David,
It was, I saw it. I was posting here to see if anyone else had either seen it or had any comments about it. Adobe is obviously trying to address concerns about a collaborative workflow with this concept.
It seemed like a viable solution to me, at least based on what I saw.
Kevin
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[Kevin Patrick] “I didn’t come across anything (I probably missed it) on Adobe’s Technology Sneak Peek: The Future of Collaborative Editing presentation that they showed during NAB.”
I haven’t see this, I would love to see it at some point.
[Kevin Patrick] “Although, I don’t know why Adobe would show something like this in a public forum. I can understand the importance of getting customer feedback..”
As David pointed out, Adobe does this pretty often. I remember a technology demo a few years ago where they showed an application that did 3D tracking and camera mapping. As ususal, they stated that it was just a demo and that they didn’t know exactly what they were going to do with it… apparently, that technology made it into AE (surprise).
“I’m not sure why they would not do it under an NDA and in front of all your competitors.”
Good question, I’m inclined to agree with DRW here. I think it’s partially about differentiation, and partly about keeping people engaged in what Adobe is doing. Personally, I think the tech demos are great… I wish all the big media creation software companies had something like Adobe Labs.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “”I’m not sure why they would not do it under an NDA and in front of all your competitors.”
Good question, I’m inclined to agree with DRW here. I think it’s partially about differentiation, and partly about keeping people engaged in what Adobe is doing. Personally, I think the tech demos are great… I wish all the big media creation software companies had something like Adobe Labs.”
You’re actually seeing more of that these days. Avid did a compelling demo of their collaborative cloud toolset a couple of years ago, and it just came to fruition this year.
QTube actually shipped last year, and there were a number of others shown AND shipping this year, including A Frame, which Walter Biscardi mentions in his show round-up, posted later today. There are a bunch of others whose names escape me now…but in that sense, I think it was critical for Adobe to show they’re in this angle of the game. CS6 has way too much momentum for people to even think holding back waiting for a collaboration solution.
It’s worth nothing that Adobe was way, way out in front on this with Acrobat. There’s an article in the COW library talking about the uses of this for video (marking up frames, adding notes and the like) something like 6 years ago.
And also worth noting that a number of people I spoke to were going to NAB looking specifically for these kinds of solutions. I joked a while back that this is like HD. In 2001, people were saying, “WTF? I don’t work in HD.” By 2003, it was “WTF? You don’t have HD?” It’s going to be that with the cloud. After a bunch of hype and false starts, it’s for real and already shipping from a number of vendors. And if you need it now, you may well need it NOW.
Hey, before we called it collaboration in the cloud, we used to call it just “online,” right? It’s pretty cool though, as the wheel of hype spins once again into reality.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wKJ9KzGQq0w
Google are pushing forward with their Cloudy solutions too, this one’s good because it seems to read and play a lot of file formats in the browser.
Steve Connor
“FCPX Professional”
Adrenalin Television -
[Tim Wilson] “You’re actually seeing more of that these days. Avid did a compelling demo of their collaborative cloud toolset a couple of years ago, and it just came to fruition this year.”
I remember the Edit Anywhere on Anything demo from a couple of years ago but I haven’t heard anything about it since.
2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5) -
[Tim Wilson] “It’s worth nothing that Adobe was way, way out in front on this with Acrobat. There’s an article in the COW library talking about the uses of this for video (marking up frames, adding notes and the like) something like 6 years ago.”
Yes, Adobe Clip Notes. It was in the CS4 Suite for Premiere Pro and AE. It was a useful function… I’m not sure why Adobe killed it.
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/Clip_Notes_1.php
Shawn
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This was an incredibly cool preview. Chris Harlan has been talking about the thin client a lot, and this was a great example. As Kevin said, all the footage was being streamed to the local editor from the remote machine with playback quality being scaled to available bandwidth, and with full quality reference stills when playback was stopped. Also interesting was the fact that effects were rendered in realtime on the server side, and the result streamed back to the local client.
What was even more remarkable was that the local machine was on the show floor in Las Vegas, and the remote machine was back in San Jose somewhere. This would be a powerful technology on a local network, but the fact that they were able to show it working over the Internet was all the more enticing.
Some contributors to this forum seem to have taken the stance that Apple is the only true innovator in the NLE space, and I hope that a discussion like this can change their minds. Adobe looks to be at the early stages of a very serious play at unifying geographically distributed teams, and that may well prove to be (imagine me putting a dollar in the virtual swear jar as I say this) a game-changer.
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “Some contributors to this forum seem to have taken the stance that Apple is the only true innovator in the NLE space, “
hey, hey – now come on: secondary storylines? I mean, who couldn’t fall in love with that totally random weirdness?
getting that weird little gradient cap appearing over the clips? So I can make a dissolve between two clips above the primary?By invoking the random power of a… drum roll… secondary storyline?
I’m telling you Walter: that conceptual leap felt like the clear blue skies, deeply logical future of editing to me. 😉
(snark!)
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
Your right, I forgot to mention the server with the media was not on the show flow. Three machines, three different cities/states. As well as the fact that all the effects were rendered on the server side.
All the media and all the heavy lifting was being done on the server. So the machine you are connected to the server with doesn’t need a great deal of power. In fact, since it’s Adobe, you can use some big iron PC hardware for the server and an iMac or Macbook to edit with.
I walked away from the demo thinking it was a great concept. But I didn’t get the same impression from the people around me. Nor have I seen anyone talking about this concept since the show, on any site.
It seemed to work fairly well. Although it was a pretty simple demo. I’d like to see how a more complex project would hold up to this architecture. I wonder if Adobe has anyone on their beta test team (outside Adobe) playing around with it yet.
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