“Questioning my goodness, questioning my strength” – Yoli Mayor, singing during the opening Inspiration Keynote at Day 2 of Adobe MAX.
Dax warned me about this. I didn’t think they would happen so quickly. Though, I don’t think we define the MAX blues as the same thing.
During his MAX First-Timers Networking session, the MAX-famous Dax Castro, aka MAX with Dax, noted that we would feel post-MAX blues. By inspiring, and connecting, attendees shower in the endorphin rush, catapult with adrenaline, and fly with dopamine. And the immediate drop, the return to “normal,” can be accompanied with blues.
But I had morning MAX blues.
It mixed with the yellow of a pre-dawn Miami sunrise. Humidity and sunlight illuminated a press photo walk as the first morning activity. Led by Katrin Eismann, Adobe Lightroom Product Manager for Learning & Inspiration, we investigated how to “think of the photo in Lightroom” as we captured on our devices. Admiring another photographer’s ability to visualize and conceptualize a possibility, Eismann, “she knows how the camera sees”.
My brain rushed right in, a dedicated steward and highly trained expert of all things limiting. Do I know how the camera sees? Do I need to work on my own vision?
This meant I was perfectly primed for the Inspiration Keynote. The lines from Day 2’s motivational video reverberated through the convention center and my brain. “Use what daunts you as fuel. “ “Learning to gain confidence from doubt.” “It’s not an easy path.”
There’s another set that echoes in my head from Keynote speaker Emonee LaRussa: You are getting better every year. LaRussa’s session, and I do mean that in every sense of the word considering the links to CBT, shared that it’s time to put our thoughts on trial. Using evidence, we can counter negative thoughts to be wrong. Positive thoughts to be right.
Maybe it’s time to change that mental diet.
The South Beach Diet, popularized in the early 2000’s here in Miami, emphasized lean proteins, low carbohydrates and eliminated a variety of other items. The word diet, in and of itself, immediately brings the word “restriction” to mind, even when we’re referring to a lifestyle or a non-caloric deficit.
But now is not the time to restrict.
To be successful in the Adobe ecosystem, we need to experience as much as we can. We can’t assume we’re great at only one thing (and of course we know that’s not true) and we can’t assume we know it all. We need to be open. We “put in the time to be great” but you don’t restrict your sleep, as LaRussa reminds us. We can’t restrict the details in our text prompts in Firefly Video Model. We can’t restrict ourselves from education and knowledge and learning more. We can’t control our negative thoughts and we should not accept the limitations, restrictions that come with them.
And in the case of Frame.io, you can’t restrict to a few brands of cameras with the integration.
Announced at Adobe MAX, three new camera ecosystems will be entering the Frame.io sphere: Leica, Nikon, and Canon. For Canon, the first cameras will be the C80 and the C400, and they are slated to be Frame.io compatible with a firmware update in Winter 2024. And, in the theme of no restrictions, a new C400 with the Frame.io C2C capability (in Beta) was demonstrated for me on the floor. There is pure delight in knowing that a tool you might use daily has an added element to make your life even easier. Content creation is all about speed. And when we talk about making a shift to our daily practices and routines when it comes to healthy eating, we also talk about ease. We want to make it easy. Here, too, Frame.io aims to make it easy to cover, say, the Adobe MAX conference itself while “running and gunning” with your cameras: film with a suite Frame.io Camera to Cloud enabled devices (including your phone), and have the assets automatically enter Frame.io. That’s it. It is, both in a professional term and a reference to sugar, “sweet.”
It’s important to note that the proxies are what is transferring from the camera. For the C400, proxies have to be enabled for this to work. It’s a two step process: make sure proxies are enabled (this can be to the SD card slot), and Frame.io is set up to upload them as well.
The new version of the platform has a bit of a makeover. How Miami. “It’s sleek,” I say to JJ Powell, Sr. Product Marketing Manager of Frame.io, giving us the starting word. “We’ve taken years and years and years of feedback to say, hey, what’s a way to maintain the beauty in the original look and feel while bringing it into a sleep new interface that’s customizable too, because that’s the drive,” Powell expanded.
Among the new features is the ability to send your captures straight to Lightroom through the Frame.io ecosystem. It simply requires clicking on “Connect to Lightroom” and logging in with your Adobe ID. It’s not meant to be a long process, where “it takes 100 steps and you’re selecting this and selecting this. It really is just a login experience,” Powell shared about Lightroom. Another new addition to the Frame.io experience is anchored Comments, where you can add your feedback to a specific point in the file, video, or other asset.
We no longer need to restrict our Firefly prompts either: all of the example materials for Firefly Video model showcase lengthy description, demonstrably longer than the Firefly Model 4 or 3 promotional materials. This is a storyteller’s dream. If I can input a section of my script to produce an example shot? That’s the goal.
“It turns out that most downloads from Firefly come from prompts that are between 20 and 30 words long. So that seems to be the sweet spot,” shared Zeke Koch, VP Product Management or Adobe Firefly. “Most people come in typing very short prompts, but then as you want to get something closer and closer to what’s in your mind, you keep adding words until you get close to what you want. The more words you use, the more interesting the images get. And so generally, it’s like a good habit to use lots of words to get you know better images in more detail.
The Firefly Video Model is “designed to be commercially safe,” which means that Adobe has “a legal right to train on every image in our data set” and “we’ve scanned all of those images using a combination of technology and humans,” Koch shared. “We’ve looked at every single one and made sure that they don’t contain other people’s intellectual property.” The Firefly Video Model, like the Firefly AI model as a whole, is trained on the Adobe Stock library assets, public domain, and images that creators have allowed them to train on. This means the video model has ample examples to glean knowledge from I noted that I was able to extend a macro video and a timelapse video (albeit the people turned into blurs, but that’s not surprising) which was a fun experiment in Generative Extend. “If there are examples of [it] in the stock library, which is like, 100 million videos, then odds are it’ll be able to do that,” Powell noted. There is in fact a resolution and time restriction with Firefly video Model: you can only create 720p 5-second outputs.
Like the video model, we are always learning in this environment. And the learning is not restricted to humans: I unexpectedly even managed to get the Meta Ray Ban sunglasses to learn how to do a task. In a moment that is probably the plot to a sci-fi movie, I attempted to get the sunglasses to read a piece of paper. After telling me what the paper was, but not reading it directly, the glasses told me that it might have to be asked for a direct reading, and it learned how to do this. After I said “Meta Stop,” and told the Meta employee what the I learned, the glasses said, “Yes that’s right- sounds like you learned to ask for a direct reading in AI.” So we’re both learning, even when it’s supposed to be off. I also inquired how much Meta cost. The response? “I’m a free service with an extra cost for glasses.”
Sneaks is set up as a cinematic experience, complete with movie theater candy and popcorn. Both are definitely not on the South Beach. The candy theme extended into Project Remix a Lot (the best name of the night, hands down). Avneet Kaur, a Computer Scientist at Adobe, showcased new technology able to shift a creative projects layouts and resize according to needs. On stage, the new project, which modified and reshaped a Halloween poster, was accompanied by a sprinkling of joke around tricks and treats.
The world is full of tricks and treats. Diets can be a trick. Restricting our creative intake can be a trick. So treat yourself to a full creative diet. A full knowledge diet.
Adobe MAX reminds me not to restrict myself through self beliefs. To not be afraid. To put it as eloquently as Inspiration Keynote speaker Jason Naylor did, perhaps we can “love life colorfully.” Though maybe without those morning blues.
So I leave MAX with Mayor’s lyrics, from the same opening song echoing:
“I could go through my day pretending I don’t feel what’s happening.I try to hide my eyes. I try to hide my mind. I try to hide my pride, But I can’t hide. You know I tried.”
Let’s not hide.
