Adobe Community Leaders Summit

Last week, Adobe invited a variety of well-known people in the industry to come get a closer look at what they’ve been working on, and to provide feedback on their direction. To Adobe’s credit, this was no “preaching to the choir” session; many of those invited were FCP and Avid editors, and several current users gave Adobe personnel an earful both publicly and privately. It was also made clear to us that no specific product versions or release dates were being discussed, and that we couldn’t repeat anything that had not already been mentioned publicly (reminds us of the old Zen Buddhist saying “Those who know don’t say; those who say don’t know”). However, this event gives us an excuse to aggregate into one place a number of emerging technologies Adobe has already murmured about, for those who haven’t had the chance to keep up…

TED Talk: The Truly Soft Side of Software

The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference is a place where Big Thinkers gather annually to inspire and be inspired. I’ve been going through their online archive of talks for my own amusement and education, and sharing with you ones I found to be particularly interesting.

Back in June, I highlighted Jakob Trollback’s talk on Rethinking the Music Video. This time around, I want to highlight a “music video” that’s considerably in the more abstract domain. In this presentation, Golan Levin discusses the custom performance software he writes which allows him to improvise music with accompanying visuals. We’re strictly in the experimental realm here (the soundtrack is 60s-era avant-garde electronic music - listen with your speakers on to annoy your cubemates), but sometimes, great inspiration comes from the very fringes of an art. Note: The visuals are initially very simplistic (the piece is titled “Scribble”), but become much more complex about 4:40 into the video.

Aside from Levin’s TED Talk, I strongly recommend you check out the Flong Interactive Art site (pictured above) which contains a number of interesting audiovisual works by Levin and his friends - there’s lots of cool interactive visual pieces on there.

Mainstream Media’s new correspondent: YouTube

I’m still working out how I feel about this, so feel free to chime in with your own comments.

This past weekend, drag racer Scott Kalitta died in an accident while qualifying for the NHRA SuperNationals. The event was televised by ESPN.

I first learned about the tragedy while browsing the web site for the Los Angeles Times newspaper. In the initial version of the story, they didn’t have photos, but they did have a video of the accident.

It turns out that the video was an embedded clip from YouTube.

The interesting implication of this is that a news gathering source no longer needs to have staff on site, trade the story with a partner, or buy it from another news service; they can just link to a free service someone else has created.

AFI Digital Content Lab Sessions

We occasionally post mention of what’s happening at the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab (AFI DCL for short), as it’s perhaps the best incubator around right now for interactive television. Here’s a couple of sessions they have coming up that are part of other conferences (the first with a registration discount):

MediaXchange June 25-27, Los Angeles, CA Exhibition Session June 26: New Technologies Impacting Drama Creation Professionals from around the globe congregate in Los Angeles to address new models for scripted drama and for an exciting insight into the fast-evolving future of a more global TV drama industry. AFI Discount Resistration Code: EDU814 (3-day) or AFIEDU814 (1-day).

LA TV Festival Digital Day July 30-August 1, 2008, Hollywood, CA DCL Session, July 30: Steal These Ideas Join project participants and mentors as they share lessons learned in the Digital Content Lab. The innovations and ideas developed in the lab are for the benefit of the entire television community, so come, learn and steal an idea or two!

Who Will Rule The New Internet?

For those who contemplate issues such as the title of this post, Josh Quittner wrote an excellent article for Time on this subject. (It’s rather long, so be ready to carve out a small chunk of time before heading over to read it.) He doesn’t preach, nor pick winners and losers; he notes at the end “I’m rooting for everyone in this war.” Instead, he gives thoughtful, in-depth coverage of what Facebook, Google, and Apple’s iPhone are up to, along with a bit of a history lesson and comments from top-shelf thinkers such as Marc Andreessen. Find a few minutes this weekend and give it a read.

Web Video: The New “Skip Intro”?

Remember when “Flash Intros” (or what Adobe would prefer me to call “introductory animations created with the software Adobe Flash,” lest I dilute their trademark) were all the rage? You had to have one play when a user first arrived at your site to be considered hip, media savvy, and up-to-date.

But in reality, most of these detracted from rather than added to a web site’s experience, resulting in lots of users clicking on the oft-included “skip intro” button so they could get to what they were really after: the content on a site. In the end, many were an annoyance rather than a value-add.

I’m beginning to fear that web video could suffer the same fate. I’m sure you and your client feel more hip, media savvy, and up-to-date when you include video on their site, but are you really serving their user by doing so?

AFI Digital Content Lab Looking for Mentors

The American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab (AFI DCL, for short) is looking for mentors for some high-profile interactive media projects, including Grey’s Anatomy and PBS’s News Hour. Details - as well as a calendar of upcoming events around North America - are copied below from their recent press release (follow the “more” jump if you’re reading this from a main page). This is a chance to become involved with designing what some hope will be the future face of television.

Whether or not it does turn out to be the future face of television is still out for verdict: I lived through the hopeful times of CD-I and other interactive media when a lot of us thought we were going to help raise the overall level of humanity by making coffee-table books available on an expensive, not entirely easy to use medium. This episode of misspent personal enthusiasm has left me a bit more cautious, thinking the computer is for interacting and the television set is for consuming. But the number of people who vote in response to an American Idol episode (or called in to a toll number during the Shall We Boil Larry the Lobster bit on Saturday Night Live, oh so many years ago) does indicate that at least some like to interact with their mass-consumed entertainment. So here’s your chance to try to design some interactivity that works:

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