Skillfully Talented or Talentedly Skillful

The video industry historically has been driven by technologists. I’m not referring to the technologists who have invented and developed all the products that allow those waves of light to be converted into electronic signals formerly and now bits, manipulated, and ultimately delivered to a growing number of different screens. I’m thinking more about all of the individuals who produced the content we consume today. Where am I going with this? Why am I being so cryptic? Do I get paid by the word to write this blog (NO I am not paid for those who don’t know my sense of humor). Get to the point, Steve! What’s this got to do with skills and talent?

Well first lets define what my understanding of the differences are. This is probably an oversimplification (need to save on word count somewhere), but talent is something one is born with and skills are something that are not innate but you can learn.

Avid Express—- RIP

I would be remiss if I didn’t post a quick something about Avid’s Monday morning announcements.

First, it is always a little sad to see the end of a product. Thousands of man hours of work are being gently laid aside, and I feel for that team.

On a broader level, this is just one more step in the democratization of video that Adobe and others have been driving for many years.

The power of your personal networks—virtual and real

I’ve always been a fascinated by the Internet’s ability to facilitate social relationships. No other medium has the power to bring distant people together as easily as the Internet. It has even changed the way we think about the meaning of community— from a bond of common location to a bond of common interest. I’m particularly impressed with the latest generation of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Nowadays, you can find Adobe-related user groups and professional connections on these and other social networking sites. (I’m a member of both, by the way.) Never to be outdone, ProVideo Coalition has built a community section upon the Ning platform. Very cool.

What’s more, your Adobe tools are evolving to reflect the power of personal digital connections. Within Acrobat, you can start a virtual meeting centered around the document you’re reading. Adobe Kuler has been attracting designers in an amazing way. I like to think of Kuler as the Flickr of color schemes. And Adobe Soundbooth CS3 has a cool new built-in feature called Resource Central, which allows audio editors to keep in touch with fresh content, musical goodies and just the right kind of news. I think it’s safe to say we’re just scratching the surface about how we see the power of digital connections making you as creative and productive as possible.

Creating interactive web video with a tool you already know and use.

(now with an example at the bottom)
Encore CS3, Premiere Pro’s trusty DVD authoring sidekick has a few new tricks up its sleeve to help give you a competitive edge.  I’ll talk more about high definition Blu-ray disc authoring in another post.  This post is for those of you in the traditional video workflow who want to be able to create interactive web video experiences, BUT you don’t want to have to learn a new tool. 

Encore CS3 can now export a version of your existing DVD project for use on the web. 
Here’s how -
1. Author your DVD or Blu-ray project as you normally would using Encore’s intuitive interface and integration with Photoshop and After Effects. 
2. In the Build panel choose “Flash”
3. Select your quality preset
4. Click “Build” - you’re done!

Encore encodes all your videos to .flvs, creates a .swf that provides all the DVD-like interactivity, and creates an .xml file that ties the .flvs to the .swf.  Encore also embeds the .swf in a template .html page. 

The result is a DVD-like experience on the web complete with features like main menu and chapter menu navigation, motion menus, slideshows, extra features, and the ability to skip to chapters.  When compared with the typical web video experience where the only control you have is play and pause Encore’s Flash export is a significantly better experience.  It allows you to create the design and chapter navigation viewers are used to on DVDs. 

Give it a try and let me know what you think. 

Thanks for reading,
Nate

A little bit about me.  I’m the product manager for Adobe Encore and Visual Communicator.  Additionally, I am also working on developing community related features for our DMO products.

Here is an example of a project one of our customers sent me created with the Flash export feature in Encore. 
http://www.theatreofillusion.com/online-dvd/

Video Beauty Pageants & the Tao of Britney Spears

The infamous “Last Ten Feet” problem in a nutshell is that no matter how much effort we put into lovingly capturing high quality HD video, gingerly compressing it and then shoving it down newly obese fiber pipes - the TV screen in most homes is as maladjusted as Britney Spears in a Taoist monastery. We want serene hues that coexist in harmony and balance but instead we get garish, neon-saturated colors that practically bleed through the screen. It’s all the more painful because this is an unnecessary tragedy. Unlike the old days of analog-driven CRT tubes, today’s digital screens are more capable than ever of staying accurately calibrated. Sadly, this video crime is premeditated.

The manufacturers realize that their TVs are sold in one of two ways; either drop-shipped sight unseen in the carton or lined up at a big box retailer alongside all the competition in a beauty contest. Unfortunately, this isn’t a respectable beauty contest like the Miss America pageant of 1949. Nope, there are no points for congeniality and customers don’t get the benefit of a talent show, essay contest or evening gown competition to help them select the partner they’ll be spending 4-5 hours a day with for the next five years. Riding my already tired analogy farther than I should, the TV line-up at a big box store is more like a no-holds-barred, 90 second wet t-shirt contest at a biker bar, t-shirts optional. In such a, shall we say, “shallow” environment old-fashioned things that used to matter like grace, poise, refinement and character aren’t at the top of the “must-have” list (or so I’ve been told). TV manufacturers have learned the hard way that victory goes to the biggest, brightest and brassiest, so that’s how they calibrate every screen as it leaves the factory. Oh, and it’s not just the default settings, on some models ALL the presets are getting the same over-the-top, photon-blasting treatment. If this continues, some of these Chernobyl-vision TVs should seriously be bundled with radiation-proof eye protection, and while you might consider CopperTone UV-blocking sunscreen with 50 SPF, there’s also my new signature line of Bars’nTone YUV-blocking TV lotion with -50 IRE.

The Last Ten Feet

People in the cable and telephone industries talk a lot about “the last mile problem”. This term refers to the fact that between their central and local offices they have massive bandwidth, yet that bandwidth-spewing fire hose narrows down to a tiny soda straw in the last mile (or couple miles) between the nearest local office and most homes. To fix this problem they are spending billions of dollars to dig up streets and lay high capacity fiber optic cable over that ‘last mile’. That’s a lot more than Happy Meal money but the payoff is big. Really big. All that extra bandwidth will result in more channels and services to sell to us, the viewers. The silver lining to this silver cloud is that the digital video we watch will also be less compressed and more of it will be in high definition. This is a very good thing, particularly for those of us in certain technological backwaters where the infrastructure is so antiquated that standard definition channels are over-compressed to the point where any decent morse code operator hopped up with an IV drip of Red Bull could keep up with the data rate.

However, that’s not the problem I want to talk to you about. Why? Well because that problem is already being solved by a large herd of fiber-laying backhoes. It’s a beautiful thing. Just like grazing mastodons used to turn prehistoric vegetation into, um, post-mastodon “by-product”; these bit-bearing backhoes eat up your monthly subscriber fees and turn them into fiber by-product that they leave behind. And they’re even nice enough to dig a hole for the fiber and cover it back up as neatly as a cat with OCD. Trust me, mastodons didn’t do that last part. Ok, I’ll admit it’s not absolutely perfect. This fleet of backhoes does manage to annoy the living, um, by-product out of motorists and they move with a slothfulness that can make the public works department look downright efficient by comparison but bottom line, they’re going to deliver 100x the bits per buck to your doorstep in short order.

Ok, then what am I rambling on about? Well, there is the OTHER problem. The one for which there currently is no solution, however I may just have a way that we, the readers of PVC, can help solve it. You see, on that glorious day when all those billions of bits are shining their way right up the backside of every TV, we still won’t have solved the image quality problem for a lot of viewers. The reason is what I call “the last ten feet problem”. I’m talking here about the ten feet between the front of the TV and most couches. Tune in tomorrow(ish) when I’ll wax all poetic about this strange phenomenon and explain how you and I are, in fact, uniquely equipped to solve it.

Audition 3 on a Mac?

The latest release of Adobe’s flagship professional audio tool, Audition 3, supports both Windows XP and Vista natively.  You can also run Audition 3 on OSX using Leopard’s Boot Camp or virtualization software from VMWare or Parallels.  Here’s a link to a recent post on our Inside Sound blog discussing the various options for running Audition on a Mac.
http://blogs.adobe.com/insidesound/2008/02/audition_3_on_a_mac_1.html

Wine Futures

To borrow from Mark Twain, “rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated”. So now that you know I’m still here at Adobe; the next question(s) that come to mind might be: 1) what am I up to these days?, and/or 2) What exactly is a Product Manager of Interactive Futures? (what a mysterious sounding job - wish my business card said that). Well, for the moment I’m still in super secret squirrel mode working on a new project here at Adobe for creative professionals. I like to think of it as a blend of some of Adobe’s best technologies (and people - excluding myself) in the areas of interactivity, video, and motion. If you want me to say more, you’ll either need to tickle it out of me (or ply me with expensive tequila). Or who knows maybe a glimpse (if you blink, you might miss it) of the future will be revealed at a trade show that you happen to be at.

When I worked on After Effects, I used to playfully say; “If doesn’t move it’s dead”. I think I need help with a new mantra; If it isn’t interactive, it’s_________. I could use help filling in the blank.

Anyway, just wanted to take this opportunity to say hello and that I look forward to starting a dialog with y’all here in addition to my “Official Adobe Blog” which has been on an unplanned hiatus.

Steve Kilisky

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