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the other shoe drops – Adobe Anywhere goes software only
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[Andrew Kimery] ” I’ve been waiting for this to happen but I don’t know if it’s really a knife between Avid’s ribs unless you can seamlessly have multiple people working (and saving their work) inside the same Premiere Pro project at the same time.”
You can have multiple people working on the same “Production” (Adobe name for a multi-user Anywhere project). Someone could be ingesting new media into bins while someone else is cutting on a sequence. Each user can push and get the latest changes by clicking a single button. There is also conflict resolution in the unlikely event that two people are working on the same sequence at teh same time – in short, you will not wreck a sequence.
Dennis – Adobe guy
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[Oliver Peters] “The way Anywhere has worked is that different users can work on multiple versions of the project file (which lives on the Anywhere server), by using a check out/check in process. So discrepancies between the two versions have to be reconciled in an accept/reject dialogue. I’m not totally sure how this new implementation works differently.”
I wouldn’t use ‘check-in/out’ terminology nor is your description entirely accurate to my ears. Multiple people can be working without concern for checking in/out. For example, person A pushes up a bin of new media into the production. Later on, person B wants to save the latest edits to his/her timeline. Before that can happen, He/she will be prompted to get the latest changes (i.e the new bin of media) and then the timeline changes itself will be pushed up.
HTH,
Dennis – Adobe guy -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Adobe could have done it – they engineered the hell out of it – but they thought that would get too barmy.”
We actually had that working but as you said, it would get too barmy. Also, there are very few use cases where we see this is in regular practice (all protestations to the contrary)…
Dennis
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “that’s two people, to my understanding limited by light speed for real time editing response. Adobe anywhere can’t operate past a continental land mass for slap stop real time response. At a hardware level it’s operating on a light speed limit. But they’re both in a single production bashing away at a timeline though.”
There is some nuance lost in this demo. Based on the presentation I got a year ago, there is an exchange process. The project lives on the server and each connected system is working like a remote control. So the local instance of Premiere is basically just a web front end. When I said check-out/check-in, I think that got misunderstood based on old methods.
Multiple users can open the same project and timeline, which are virtual copies created by the server. You’ll note his “share” command. What’s not shown is that other users have some control over accepting those updates before they appear on the other local system.
What I’m not sure of is how the software-based system works. In the full Anywhere systems, three servers are used and it’s all standard computing hardware. Nothing made by Adobe, as they don’t make hardware. The Mercury Streaming Engine that he refers to is one of those servers. Whenever media is played, a low-res proxy is streamed to the local system(s). Whenever you pause on a still, that image is updated to full-res. Any multi-image composites are “built” on the server using GPU power, so that a single-stream composite can be fed to the local system(s).
No projects reside on the local system. You open the project from the server and when you close it and log off, nothing stays on the local system.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
PS: Thanks for the clarification (maybe lower down in this thread). I just read that. Yes, it was the conflict resolution that I was thinking about when I said someone has to accept the changes. However, given that the demo that Aindreas linked to implied both Michael and Jason working on the same timeline, I would imagine that would come into play.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Thanks for chiming in, Dennis. I don’t suppose there is an upcoming Adobe event in Los Angeles where this is being demonstrated? I certainly love to get a longer look at it.
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1) [Andrew Kimery] “I agree it’s about selling shared storage”
2) [Andrew Kimery] “as opposed to customers being in an ‘either stay with Avid/ ISIS or we switch to XYZ NLE on ABC storage’ and possibly choosing to ditch Avid/ISIS for other vendors.”
I see those as two different things…the third of which I think is the key.
Avid has never had any illusions about selling Unity to non-Avid customers. They don’t even have any illusions about selling Unity to every Avid customer. Hence the (terrible, terrible) move to buy (the terrible, terrible) Medea. It was never going to have “Unity” features, but would offer cheap, Avid-owned storage, a la cheap, Avid-owned M-Audio speakers.
(Side note: I have no idea what kind of due diligence Avid performed before that terrible, terrible deal, but it clearly did not involve reading Creative COW. There’s no way they’d have looked at the COW and closed that deal.)
Avid has also never been under the illusion that their customers only use Avid stuff. After Effects had towered over the rest (don’t forget: Automatic Duck was created as MC-AE interchange; the rest came later), but by the middle of the last decade, a meaningful number of Avid customers had added FCP to the mix.
(Hence also my observation that the defection from MC to FCP is greatly exaggerated, missing out on the truth that is so, so, so true today: there is RARELY only one major toolset in a shop.)
This is why Avid supported FCP on Unity 10 years ago, After Effects, Premiere (my guess: the #1 after AE, yes?), and so many others.
So, in fairness to the (not entirely unfair) shit Avid gets given for cluelessness, their Unity/ISIS approach EXACTLY followed their customers experience of NEEDING multiple tools to work on their shared storage.
Forestalling any either-or eventuality for current Avid customers is the goal of course…but really, the primary customers for ANY Avid products are CURRENT Avid customers. MC software is expanding the circle a bit, to be sure…but I really can’t imagine anyone at Avid imagining they’ll sell Avid storage to non-Avid customers.
This, btw, is why Avid feels strongly, and I believe correctly, that when it comes to understanding Avid’s business model, it doesn’t matter how much money Avid makes from hardware. Without Media Composer, there’s ZERO value proposition for ANY Avid hardware. No MC, then barring Pro Tools, no need for anything else from Avid either.
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I think we agree on all those points as well as the living through the Medea storage literally lighting on fire! Avid has always supported other application because existing Avid customers are expanding their toolset as you mention. While program editorial may be Media Composer, the marketing, PR, streaming side of the company may be using Adobe or Apple. And as you say, “nothing new” as that has been happening for the last decade.
I brought up in another thread the hypothetical discussion of which company could best bear the brunt of EOL’ing their NLE? I had Apple at the top and Avid at the bottom, on which we also agree (at least on the Avid side). The follow up question, and again only as a fun discussion over beer kind of way, If PPro and FCPx (or anyone else) became as adopted in Media Composer environments and was a full client to not only storage, but Media Central and the soon to be Marketplace, how much attention do you think Media Composer would get? It’s the usual challenge of resources, priorities and ROI. I’ve mentioned in other threads that a “Marketplace” strategy is based on number of seats attached to that Marketplace. Adobe alone added 680K seats in the last quarter. And when it comes to that type of revenue strategy, it does not matter what the actual seat is doing, other than it is part of the ecosystem.
Michael
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[Tim Wilson] ” Hence the (terrible, terrible) move to buy (the terrible, terrible) Medea.”
When I bought my first FCP system I bought a Medea Raid. Later I added an X-Raid. I thought the Medea the better of the two, so I’m curious as to why you label it the “terrible, terrible Medea” ?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf
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