will never use any other editing software other than what Adobe provides – even if they hate it

[Chris Kenny]

[Richard Cardonna] “Anyone that can afford it will buy Adobe Anywhere, and anyone that has Adobe Anywhere will never use any other editing software other than what Adobe provides – even if they hate it – because Adobe Anywhere is just too important of a product. Once your facility owns Adobe Anywhere, everyone can do everything, all at full media resolution, on a laptop sitting at Starbucks Coffee. “

‘Anywhere’ is an odd beast. It’s true that it hypothetically will enable people to edit at Starbucks. But for many types of projects, you can already do that without any kind of centralized server — today’s high end and even mid-range laptops are more than capable of doing local rendering at a very good pace, and you can store dozens or hundreds hours of proxy footage on an easily portable hard drive. ‘Anywhere’ ironically isn’t really all that appealing in terms of letting users edit from more places. Rather, it’s useful specifically to users who need to collaborate with each other in particular types of ways, which are relevant to some projects/workflows, but not really relevant at all to others.

As for “You can be in Iraq with a WiFi Connection and can access your company server’s 4K media and edit it over WiFi”, there are two major problems with that. One is that I’m highly skeptical that random Iraqi Internet connections (or random hotel room Internet connections in the US, for that matter) are really going to be up to streaming high quality video. The second is, aren’t you editing video in Iraq because you’re shooting video in Iraq? If you want to cut using ‘Anywhere’ via a server in the US, you have to first get all the video you shot back to the US. Even for CNN, with routine access to satellite transmission, it seems like it would be a lot more cost effective to edit content locally and transmit finished pieces than to transmit every frame of every clip and edit using ‘Anywhere’.

And if you don’t have routine access to satellite transmission, what are you going to do? Upload a few hundred gigs of raw footage over that random Iraqi WiFi? Good luck. The workflow I’d adopt in this kind of scenario would be to edit locally and upload something like a Blu-ray quality H.264 encode of the final output. No particular requirement for ‘Anywhere’ there.

[Richard Cardonna] “So, will Adobe take over the world? I think so.”

Given Anywhere’s current requirements, initial adoption isn’t going to happen that rapidly, so competitors likely have several years to respond.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Andrew Kimery]

It’s always interesting to see how the same thing is interpreted by different people.

I see Adobe Anywhere, and Avid’s Interplay Sphere, as giving editors an easier way to telecommute, for lack of a better term. I don’t think everyone and their brother is going to have a big server up and running but for production companies this can be a way to cost effectively add editors without having to add more physical seats. Instead of having day shifts and night shifts everyone could be working the same schedule though some people are in the office and some people are telecommuting. Instead of sending drives of footage editors could just connect remotely.

It certainly won’t fit everyone’s bill but it will be a nice option to have… assuming it works as advertised. 😉

[Richard Cardonna]

Agee but all those that freelance with the biggies will have to work with Adobe.

Richard

[Richard Herd]

[Mark Dobson] “What about FCPX anywhere?

All you need is a Macbook pro and if necessary a small thunderbolt drive.”

This was also mentioned by bob: https://www.axlevideo.com/product.html

[Brett Sherman]

[Andrew Kimery] “It certainly won’t fit everyone’s bill but it will be a nice option to have… assuming it works as advertised. ;)”

I agree. But, working on the road will be iffy for a long time. I’m not sure it will be able to allow “working at Starbucks” for a long time. Has anyone actually tried to watch a YouTube video at 720P in a Starbucks or a hotel wifi network? It’s just not going to happen unless Starbucks or hotels make significant upgrades to their system. And why would they do that when it works fine for Facebook.

And I know at the institution I work at, there simply isn’t the bandwidth for this. For our 300 employee organization we could easily occupy about half the internet bandwidth we have. People would be at our office doors trying to murder us. So great for medium to large size production facilities where they can dictate network requirements, for the rest of us I’m not so sure.

[Richard Cardonna]

Yes but if adobe anywhere takes the medium to highend it will mean the death of avid and a hard rethincking on the part of apple as to its development of fcpx into a pro app. If adobe becomes the defacto tool for highend content it will sway all the wannabees talented or not into its realm. What incentive will developers have? All schools will be adobe only. The exception will be the diehard users of other apps they will be a vanashing breed.

Richard

[Brett Sherman]

However, if the application isn’t as snappy as editing with local files, these facilities aren’t going to use it either. We’re talking milliseconds here. The engineering hurdles are going to be enormous. Also, I wouldn’t count on Apple not having something similar eventually.