Monday, March 17, 2008

The power of your personal networks—virtual and real

Michael Coleman | 03/17- 09:39 PM

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.

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Sunday, March 16, 2008

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

Nate Gentner | 03/16- 02:27 PM

(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/

Editing • (2) Comments • Most recent comments by: Joe F., Dan FMS, • Permalink

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Video Beauty Pageants & the Tao of Britney Spears

Mark Randall | 03/15- 04:15 PM

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.

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Monday, March 10, 2008

The Last Ten Feet

Mark Randall | 03/10- 06:04 PM

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.

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Thursday, March 06, 2008

Audition 3 on a Mac?

Lawson Hancock | 03/06- 12:37 PM

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

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Thursday, March 06, 2008

Wine Futures

Steve Kilisky | 03/06- 10:53 AM

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

(1) Comments • Most recent comments by: Chris Meyer, • Permalink

Thursday, March 06, 2008

TAPELESS - a paradigm shift

Giles Baker | 03/06- 10:29 AM

The introduction of tapeless workflows in our industry represents a paradigm shift in the way that we acquire, edit and deliver content. The ability to eliminate the capture process means that edited content can be turned around faster than ever before.

Tapeless workflows offer us an opportunity to reinvent the editing workflow. While the old process of ingesting from tape doesn’t apply, there are many other areas of the process that can be streamlined. For example, rather than logging a small amount of information for each segment of a tape as part of the capture process, we can now take care of all the information in a single session. And the whole idea of “export to tape” becomes less important, with delivery mechanisms going tapeless as well.

With these opportunities come challenges. The rigid production process imposed by the tape-based paradigm ensures that there is at least some consistency from facility to facility. With tapeless, freedom could mean chaos.

Editors need fast, efficient ways to log their content and to add additional metadata. With the increasing importance of metadata in workflows from broadcast to videography, getting that information into the editing workflow is important. I don’t think any one editing application has solved this problem, yet.

At Adobe we believe that true native editing is the best workflow wherever possible. In a tapeless world, true native editing means that you can start editing immediately without having to wait for rewrapping or transcoding. This enables extremely quick turnaround on content because you can edit directly from the camera without even transferring to the edit station. From a quality perspective, keeping the source around means the highest quality results because you’re always rendering from the original frames. And from a metadata perspective, it’s possible to add metadata to the original source files, which helps immensely when the assets are managed centrally.

The next few years are going to be very exciting in the editing world. We’re committed to finding new ways for you all to work more efficiently and productively!

Giles Baker

Group Product Manager, Editing Workflows.
Dynamic Media, Adobe.

(15) Comments • Most recent comments by: Mark Weiss, Eric Addison, Chris Harvey, Chris Harvey, Chris Harvey, Daniel Goldschlager, Mark Weiss, Chris Harvey, Simon Hayhurst, Mark Weiss, • Permalink

Monday, March 03, 2008

NAB --- It’s about our customers

Simon Hayhurst | 03/03- 10:37 AM

It seems that everyone has a question for me about NAB these days ..... usually “Is Adobe still going to NAB ?”.

The answer is simple --- Absolutely !

The reason is also simple --- it’s all about our customers. The opportunity to connect with over 100,000 customers and partners, share our thoughts on the business and hear their needs makes NAB the single most productive (and exhausting !) week in our year.

The broadcast industry is changing fast .... there are new technologies, new business models, new opportunities, and new challenges in every part of our customers businesses and workflows. We come out of NAB with new ideas and insights into where we can innovate to help our customers succeed --- a critical set of decisions when the industry is moving so fast.

Our customers come out of NAB with new ideas about how they can make a rapidly changing industry less of a challenge, and more of an opportunity. They get a chance to see our technolgy in detail, and get their questions answered about how it fits in their workflows. They also get the chance to have their voice heard, to literally help shape the future of the tools they use and depend on every day.

Of course, our particular situation makes investing in NAB relatively easy. Adobe’s video tools business has doubled in the last two years, and now has leading market share, our Flash Media Server business is exploding, Flash video is the delivery medium of choice, and we’ve seen tremendous excitement around our beta of Adobe Media Player. Naturally when a business is growing this fast, it’s much easier to justify the time, energy and expense that a major trade show involves.

We also believe that our success is earned, and re-earned every single day. It is our passion for serving our customers, for their success and for being a part of enabling their creative vision to be realized that drives everything we do.

Over the last year we’ve innovated at an incredible pace, with new technolgies every quarter, enabling new levels of quality and performance for content delivery, offering exciting new possibilities for traditional production, for tapeless workflows, for mobile workflows, for interactive design, and much more. I’m looking forward to seeing you all at NAB, to being able to share the excitement we have for the ways we can help you succeed in our rapidly changing industry ... and to learning more about where you’d like us to go next.

With so much innovation to share, and so many changes in our industry, the question isn’t whether we’ll be at NAB to meet with our customers and partners, but whether we can possibly fit so many good conversations and opportunities into a single week.

I for one am looking forward to trying.

See you soon !
Simon
Sr. Director of Product Management
Dynamic Media

(5) Comments • Most recent comments by: Simon Hayhurst, Daniel Kramer, Simon Hayhurst, B.R. Waizen, Richard Harrington, • Permalink

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