Category Archives: Uncategorized

Automatic videos: Do you care?

Google today unveiled a new “Auto Awesome” feature that’ll stitch together video montages with zero effort from you. It’s said to work like this.

By coincidence, Magisto got another $13 million in funding today to do essentially the same things, and they claim to have 13 million users. Plenty of others (Ptch from Dreamworks, Qwiki from Yahoo, etc.) are playing in similar territory. 

My question: If this stuff is so great (and free), why don’t we see anyone creating & sharing it? (Or do we and I’m just old/blind?)

You can read studies—not that you need to—that list the top reasons people say they don’t share videos: Watching it takes too long, it looks bad (shaky, poorly colored), and it sounds bad. Unsurprisingly, services like Google’s go after these problems: Automate everything (no creation time commitment), chop it into short segments (lower viewer time commitment), slap on some color looks, blow away the recorded audio, and apply stabilization.

Are the results something you value? What would you care about more? (I know what I want, but I’d like to hear your thoughts.)

[YouTube]

USC's Annenberg School teams up with Adobe

Great news from down south: Students & faculty get Creative Cloud free of charge, and we’re talking about more ways to support their initiatives.

Using the Adobe Creative Cloud as the centerpiece, the literacy effort has big plans to make headway in the technology-laden field of contemporary communication and journalism.

“Students will be able to become certified professionals in Photoshop and other tools, and can add this on their resume. We are also setting up a ‘genius bar’ in our new building for students to get software and hardware questions answered.” 

I recently got to spend a weekend in the desert with USC’s Animation & Digital Arts students, and I’m excited about how the new tools we’re developing can be used in their curriculum. More on all that soon.

Demo Thursday: How to make a great pitch trailer

Project Kronos is a documentary-style short film written and directed by Hasraf “HaZ” Dulull, following a mission to achieve interstellar space travel. 6 months later, it has been picked up for feature film development.

How did he get a green light? This should be an interesting talk (Thursday at 10am Pacific time):

Join HaZ to learn how he got his start in filmmaking, how he made Project Kronos, and how, as a first time filmmaker, he used the creative approach of pitch trailers to get the attention of studio executives and producers. Learn how to use Creative Cloud to create an impactful 2-minutes trailer that sells your idea, including:

  • Assembling your material and block out a pitch trailer.
  • Using After Effects to demonstrate the VFX ideas featured in the film concept
  • Using Speedgrade to create a finished Hollywood feature film look.
  • Using Adobe Premiere Pro to put it everything together, including additional secondary effects, and temp sound design

A great talk from Cabel Sasser

“Man,” said Cabel, shaking his head when he stopped by last summer, “I had a ‘John Nack Moment…'”

I was at once flattered & horrified: I’ve become synonymous with something—and that something is total existential breakdown. Damn… was that my special purpose?

I really enjoyed Cabel’s talk about starting small, freaking out vs. selling out, and doing what you love. I think you’ll enjoy it, too. (The big-company sad trombone effect after the 14-minute mark alone is worth it.)

My wife notes, “I like that he rated his own meltdown scene as ‘1-star.'”[YouTube]

SpecKing helps with Photoshop measurement & markup

Yesterday I mentioned Specctr for facilitating designer/developer hand-off. Reader Rick Johanson suggested SpecKing as an alternative:

Making the design specs in Photoshop can be a real time consuming task. SpecKing simplifies this process and lets you instantly measure any sizes, margins, and font properties in any PSD file. Your design specs can be ready in an instant, with just a few clicks.

[YouTube]

Feedback, please: Making magic with video

If my career is doing society any good at all, it’s probably in democratizing access to magic—that is, helping more people get tools to express themselves beautifully & effectively.

Now that I work in Adobe’s video group, I’m thinking hard about what kinds of awesomeness we could bring to the world. Think “high-end effects for the rest of us.”

What do you want to do with video? What would get you excited, make you want to create & share more, help you blow your friends’ minds?

For example, I wish I could…

  • instantly render any combination of effects
  • motion-track any object with a couple of clicks, then do X
  • create incredible animated titles
  • shoot tons of clips, then find the interesting parts fast
  • apply gorgeous color looks
  • automatically match color across a range of shots
  • go JJ Abrams-crazy with lens flares (well, maybe not that much)
  • insert myself into a music video

…and on & on. Yes, things like this can all be done in high-end tools, but I want to make it drop-dead easy for anyone to do, on any device.

What sounds good to you? Dream big & we’ll dream with you.

Thanks!

FAQ: Adobe apps & Mac OS Mavericks

Here’s the official word:

Adobe and Apple have worked closely together… All Adobe CC and CS6 products are compatible, but a few products require updates to the latest builds to work properly. Adobe Photoshop® CS5, CS4 and CS3 were also tested with Mac OS X Mavericks and there are currently no major issues known.

Notably After Effects requires an update (CC, CS6) to be compatible. If you see any weirdness, please let us know.
Update: If you see a message about “Adobe Creative Cloud” (the management/desktop sync app) being incompatible with Mavericks, you’ll need to reinstall it. [Via Keith Lang & Fergus Hammond]

Recent Lego excellence

 

LegoCal

[Vimeo] [Via]

Art View previews InDesign docs, fonts, more in Finder

This Quick Look extension sounds useful (sort of like Adobe Bridge being more built into Finder):

  • Makes Quick Look Compatible with Graphics Documents (including .ai, .indd, .ase, .fh11)
  • Works with Adobe Illustrator Docs Saved with or without PDF Compatibility
  • Display Fonts, Images and Swatches used in CS3+ Documents 
  • Reveal Font Files and Linked Image Files in Finder

It’s $25 in the Mac App Store. [Via]

Feedback, please: How do you want to work?

Let’s build you some better tools:

The Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator teams need your help! We’ve been thinking about some ideas that could benefit all of our customers, but before we can move forward with these ideas we need to know more about how you, our customers, are working with our products now.

We have prepared a short questionnaire (should take less than 5 minutes) that will help us gather the information we need to get started. We would greatly appreciate your time in helping us by filling it out! As a special thank you, you’ll be eligible for a $50 Amazon Gift Card for taking the survey!

Do an in-person Portfolio Review with the Behance community

Happening worldwide November 4th–11th, 2013:

Behance Portfolio Reviews bring members together at events in cities and towns around the world—organized by members, for members. Attend a Portfolio Review to present and get feedback on your work, hear from experienced professionals, and meet your local creative community.

  • Welcome & Spotlight (20 minutes): Short and inspiring presentation, curated by your host.
  • The Portfolio Reviews (60 minutes): Attendees break into small groups to have their work reviewed.
  • Mingle, Network & Drinks: Stick around to mingle and connect with your peers and industry leaders.

Tonight in SF: "Photography and the Real World in the Digital Age" with Stephen Johnson

Master landscape photographer Stephen Johnson will be presenting his work & techniques Thursday evening at Adobe San Francisco:

Steve will concentrate on digital photography’s capabilities as a set of tools to capture and decode the visual wonder of the real world. Photoshop will be explored as a tool of revelation of our camera’s light capture, using raw processing and Photoshop as straightforward photo processing tools rather than instruments of image alteration.

This talk concentrates on the tools within Photoshop critical to Photographers for straightforward photography. It is a great chance to explore digital photographic finishing with Steve, and his use of interpretive and editing tools, which he works hard to execute with restraint and finesse…

ALSO: We’ve got 2 copies of X-rite’s ColorChecker Passport as raffle prizes. So be sure to bring your business cards in order to get your name in the raffle. 

Live-coding Photoshop enhancements

PM Stephen Nielson writes,

With the release of Photoshop CC, we’re able to address customer feedback more frequently than ever before. To demonstrate just how quickly we can respond to customer feedback, we stationed Photoshop team members, including three Photoshop engineers, on the Photoshop World show floor. The assignment: speak to customers, gather their feedback and enhancement requests, and code as many customer-requested Photoshop enhancements as possible during the show, in real-time. We called this event our “Photoshop Live Codeathon.”

Check out the team in action:

 

[YouTube]

Dance your brains out with "Girl Walk//All Day"

This is so tremendously bizarre (in the most unassuming, DIY way), I kind of can’t get enough:

Girl Walk // All Day is essentially a 71-minute music video set to Girl Talk’s album All Day. There’s a loose story about three strangers who are inexplicably possessed by the spirit of Girl Talk’s music, presumably, and wander New York City dancing all the while, occasionally joined by passersby and sometimes crossing paths with one another. The most memorable of these is The Girl, performed by Anne Marsen, who clearly has some talent but is far from a technically perfect dancer; her go-for-broke moves are relatable, and what make her so compelling to watch.

[Vimeo] [Via Bianca Giaever]

Russell Brown on "Making Monsters" tomorrow night

Heh—cool:

Our very own Russell Brown will be on the Travel Channel this Sunday!

Set your DVR to record “Making Monsters” this Sunday, September 29th 8/7c. You’ll see how Distortions Unlimited created a gigantic zombie podium for Russell’s ADIM13 Conference.

The project started with a sketch created in Photoshop by Rayce Bird and ended up as a giant sculpture. This is a must-see show!

Check out a quick video preview.

ADIM

BlendMe.in: Search for vector icons within Photoshop

 Hmm—this sounds promising:

BlendMe.in is a Photoshop extension that allows you to quickly find a high-quality icon that you can simply drag and drop and then easily continue your ideation. All of the icons are vectorial and have been inserted as smart Photoshop objects, meaning that you get all the icon components as layers (vector objects, adjustment layers, etc.) so that you can easily tweak them to match your creation. [Via]

What do you think?

Search twitter mini


Adobe salutes "The New Creatives"

From Design Taxi:

To commemorate the passing of 1 million subscribers on its subscription-based service Creative Cloud, Adobe—with the help of ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners—has released a new, eye-catching ad that pays tribute to “the new creatives”.
“Creatives today do a little bit of everything, from illustration to filmmaking to Web design,” said the agency’s associate creative director Will Elliot. “We wanted the spot to celebrate how all these different disciplines are coming together.”

newCreative

[YouTube]

Lightroom, Camera Raw get new features, camera support

Lightroom 5.2 and Camera Raw 8.2 (for use in Photoshop CS6 & CC) are now available for download. Each includes a number of feature improvements & bug fixes (please see the respective posts for details) as well as new lens profiles & support for the following cameras:

  • Canon EOS 70D
  • Canon PowerShot G16
  • Canon PowerShot S120*
  • Casio Exilim EX-ZR800
  • Fujifilm FinePix HS22EXR
  • Fujifilm FinePix HS35EXR
  • Fujifilm FinePix S205EXR
  • Fujifilm X-A1
  • Fujifilm X-M1
  • Leica C (Typ 112)
  • Olympus OM-D E-M1*
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX7
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ70
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ72
  • Pentax Q7
  • Pentax K-50
  • Pentax K-500
  • Sony DSC-RX100 II
  • Sony A3000 (ILCE-3000)
  • Sony NEX-5T

* denotes preliminary support

"Dear Hector": Powerful storytelling on Radiolab

Before joining Adobe, my teammate Bianca took a cross-country bike tour in which she recorded an intense, gripping audio story that’s now featured on Radiolab:

Reporter Bianca Giaever brings us a story of forgiveness that’s nearly impossible to comprehend — even for the man at the center of it, an octogenarian named Hector Black.

It’s a difficult subject (I had to take a break) but a fascinating one.

Photoshop 14.1.1 update released

This update addresses a couple of urgent issues:

  • User preferences reset after applying 14.1 update
  • Inadvertent disablement of Graphics Processor Settings with some hardware configurations

There’s also the problem (introduced with Monday’s 14.1.0 update) of layers being deleted when you use the keyboard shortcut F5. The team is working on a fix. Meanwhile the workaround is to choose a different key command for showing/hiding the Brushes panel (via Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts). Sorry for the hassle.

A storytelling app I want but can't build; maybe you can.

The Micronaxx & I make up bizarre, freewheeling bedtime stories nearly every night, just as my dad did with me. Unlike in the old days, we at least occasionally record the stories, but it’s rare. What would change that, giving us a better archive of family memories? I’d like a mobile app that would:

  • Record you telling your kids bedtime stories (maybe after prompting you just before bedtime)
  • Transcribe the text
  • Organize the sound & text files (into a book, journal, and/or timeline layout)
  • Let you add descriptive metadata & tags to stories
  • Enable easy publishing from the journal to a blog, Tumblr, etc.
  • Maybe let you add other supporting media (illustrations, photos, links, etc.)
  • Maybe let you present those images, etc. at various times as the story progresses

I think the key thing is in the recording/transcription: Without that it’s dead in the water, even for a guy like me. Prompting & organization would be good, but I really want to see the output (even if rough).

I won’t get to build such an app anytime soon, if ever, so I’m throwing the idea into the ether in case you’d find it interesting (either as a user or as a developer). Maybe the “bedtime story” angle seems too niche-y, but you might be surprised: RapGenius started just by annotating rap lyrics & is now very well funded to socially annotate any kind of document. “Do one thing well” instead of starting with ocean-boiling.

If you’d pay for such an app, please speak up—and if you’d build it, I’ll happily be your first customer.

Mario Andretti, brought to you through Premiere Pro

Nicolas de Toth changed from skeptic to convert while editing a new commercial featuring Mario Andretti:

I was aware of Premiere Pro for a long time, but I hadn’t given it a fair shot…

Overall, it was very nimble and I never found myself waiting for anything like I do on occasion with Avid… Editing is somewhat like writing. If your process is interrupted you can lose your train of thought, and with it your overall creativity. Premiere Pro was more fluid than I expected.

Check out the full interview here.

On a related note, this line from a DV Magazine review by Oliver Peters caught my eye:

Premiere Pro CC is definitely the best direct replacement for Final Cut Pro…It’s fast, handles a wide range of native media and is versatile in many situations…Adobe definitely has a winner in Premiere Pro CC.

Adobe's own Survivor

Lex

Adobe PM Lex van den Berghe makes me look pretty damn boring:

From fending for himself in the bush of Kenya during Survivor, writing in his local newspaper, being a motivational speaker and starting a new National Geographic reality television series, Lex has had a diverse career, to say the least.

Check out his offbeat career. (As he notes, “In a hundred years we’ll all be dead…what’s the worst that could happen?”)

Check out Adobe/Behance's Pop-Up School in NYC

Sounds like a really interesting event, September 18-20th in New York:

We’re curating a killer program around three skill sets that should be in every creative’s arsenal: career development, entrepreneurship, and brand + digital strategy. Each day will feature an incredible lineup of talks and master classes from creative visionaries like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Adobe’s own Scott Belsky, and Facebook designer Ben Barry […]

We’re building out an incredible interactive space called the Playground that will feature a hand-crafted lineup of mentorship sessions, skill-building booths, interactive workshops, and creative tool demos.

Register by Sept. 4 with promo code “adobeschool99code” to get 30% the regular ticket price.

What is it we value?

Oh, humans…

  • “Studies have shown that people prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests,” writes James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, “but that they actually get more pleasure from drinking wine they are told is expensive. If lobster were priced like chicken, we might enjoy it less.” [Via] See also “Veblen goods.” Maybe we should just quintuple the price of mobile apps & see what happens (though for most that’d be five times zero…)
  • Hmm, this Quora posting is anonymous, but interesting if true: “The loading screen exists because when the information is returned to the user as quickly as possible, he or she will often perceive it to be less valuable. It’s as if the server didn’t put much effort into really finding a great deal. No customer ever actually articulates that; but surveys, customer testing sessions, and most importantly conversion rates support the notion that when a seven or eight second loading screen tells the user that the numbers are being crunched just for this one query, the result is perceived to be more valuable.” [Via Geoff Badner]

Lego's 3,000-piece Sydney Opera House set

Epic. I spied this monster at the Lego store Monday & had to know more. “‘Considering it took engineers eight years to figure out how to make the real Opera House sails, I feel quite proud that it only took us three,’ [creator Jamie] Berard says.” I love the evident pride & joy these folks take in their work.

And hey, as long as we’re screwing around with Lego-related links…

Wacom introduces new Cintiq tablets, stylus

Exciting news from our friends at Wacom: According to their site,

  • “The Cintiq Companion is a fully functional, Windows 8-based tablet that enables you to run full versions of creative software such as Adobe Photoshop.” With 8GB RAM & 256GB of storage it costs $1999.
  • “The Cintiq Companion Hybrid [$1499-1599] functions as a traditional Cintiq when connected to a Mac or PC. When unplugged, it is perfect for light, spontaneous work when on the go using Android apps.”
  • The $99 Intuos Creative Stylus for iOS [iPad 3-4, Mini] “sports a unique pressure-sensitive pen tip that recognizes 2048 levels of pressure.”


I can’t help but think of John Gruber musing, “How ironic would it be if the iPad becomes the dominant mass market computer and the Surface becomes the one for artists?”

Lean Startup books we're using at Adobe

We’re working to start a new business within Adobe, and to that end my partner Chris Prosser has been reading books you might find interesting:

As an entrepreneur/intrapreneur you have to be able to lie to yourself a little. Otherwise you would just stay at home and not pursue the new idea that you have. But lying to yourself until you ship your product to the marketplace can be expensive and emotionally devastating.

For those of you new to the Lean Startup Methodologies, they are tools that help you stop lying to yourself and check in with reality at all phases of developing your business. My own path with these tools has been somewhat backward. I originally thought we were further along with our business when I picked them up. But as I applied a tool that I thought was appropriate for the phase of development (for instance a retention graph for our private beta), reality would come through and we need to go a step earlier in the chain to find the problem. We finally ended up all they way back at the beginning.

Here are the books I read and what I took away from them.