Okay, so regular readers know that I absolutely love attending as many tech-industry events here in Chicago as I possibly can; and regular readers also know that I don't actually get to do such things very often, simply because the tech industry doesn't hold a lot of events here, but rather in northern California where most of the tech industry here in America is located. So needless to say, I was pretty excited when I read at the Adobe blog that they would in fact be showing up in Chicago soon themselves, to do a day-long workshop concerning a new bundle of software they've just released, and that anybody who wanted could sign up for free and attend. And so that's what I exactly did, in fact, and yesterday finally attended said workshop.

The new bundle being shown off yesterday, by the way, is something Adobe is calling "Production Studio," and I have a feeling that it's going to really blow the socks off of some of my readers out there. See, for those who don't know, Adobe is the maker of something like 95 percent of the world's greatest software for creative types: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Premiere, After Effects, I could really just go on and on if I wanted to. And there's a reason why these applications have become so popular over the years, which is that they're legitimately great applications, worthy of being popular; and I myself am a big fan of Adobe as well, and have been using their software literally all the way back to 1984, when the Mac was invented in the first place. (Jeez, have I really been an Adobe customer for 22 years now? Yeah, I guess I have. And just so that we're all on the same page about all of this - no, I have not accepted any money or goods from Adobe to write today's entry, nor is anyone at Adobe even aware that I was going to write today's entry.)

All of this has been great enough on its own, of course; but then several years ago Adobe started developing this real obsession with trying to get their applications to work more in tandem with each other, learning as they did that this was how a majority of their customers were actually using the applications. (That is, an ad agency might manipulate images in Photoshop, do some drawings in Illustrator, put it all together in InDesign, and then output it for the printer via Acrobat.) So, things started a couple of years ago, when Adobe started releasing new versions of their apps with more and more shared tools and protocols; so that is, once you learn how to use the "Lasso" tool in Photoshop, for example, then you immediately know how to use the Lasso tool in every other Adobe application, which cuts down profoundly on the learning curve involved.

And then not too long ago Adobe released a brand-new bundle of applications called "Creative Suite" (or CS), which was finally the first mature iteration of this synergy-obsession they have going on over there; for example, you can now simply drag and drop files from one application to another, without losing any of the special qualities of that file that used to only exist in one app or the other. (That is, for example, a file with multiple layers will now keep its multiple layers, no matter which program you open it in; and this is compared to times in the past, when you would often need to flatten those layers before the image would open in another program.) And not only that, but they created a brand-new application as well called Bridge, which is just this amazing central organizer for every single Adobe-friendly file you might have on your computer, with this brilliant way of keeping track of projects that multiple people might be working on at the same time (like in the case of an ad agency, for example). And I've been using CS for almost a year myself (well, technically CS2), ever since that reader of mine donated his old G4 desktop system to me; and I can honestly state that it's one of the more kickass software bundles I've ever used in my life.

So now Adobe has released a new bundle of software, which they're calling Production Studio (or PS), which is where I think a lot of my readers are going to get excited; because PS does pretty much exactly what I just described regarding CS, but this time exclusively for video and audio. Yeah, that's right. The Premium edition, for example, offers the Photoshop and Illustrator mentioned before, along with Premiere (for video editing), After Effects (for post-production), Audition (for sound-editing), and Encore (for DVD creation). And it comes at this really amazing price, too - around US$1,700 altogether (850 pounds, maybe 1300 euros), compared to the $3,750 it would cost to purchase each app separately. And many of these apps are the same ones used by actual Hollywood people, and especially when it comes to television shows, commercials, music videos and other shorter projects; which, yeah, means that once you actually get your system assembled, for about two thousand bucks you too can have the software needed to crank out videos of the same exact quality of what you see in most TV shows, commercials and music videos. Amazing, man, amazing.

Oh, and did I mention that these are all new versions of the apps as well? And that Adobe has added a bunch of new features to each that will literally make your jaw drop when watching them? Or that the ability to use Flash has now been seamlessly integrated into each and every one of these apps now too, since Adobe and Macromedia merged last year? Or that you can add Flash Professional 8 to this bundle as well, also for a discounted price? Oh, man, you video and audio people are going to be creaming in your pants, I'm telling you, when you finally get a chance to get your hands on some of this stuff. So as usual, I ended up taking a bunch of notes in real time as the presentation progressed; and also as usual, I'm having a hard time now grouping these notes into a coherent essay, so thought I'd just run them here verbatim instead. And I have more to tell you about the day as well, after the notes, so don't give up reading now!

--Interesting - turns out that Adobe has retained Macromedia's old font usage and color schemes, so even though their products say "Adobe" on the box now, the boxes themselves still look like Macromedia boxes. Pretty smart, I think.

--Big laugh from the presentation's main host: "Um, we're getting a little crowded in here, so could I ask all the Macintosh owners to please move to this side of the room?"

--The user interface of the new PS programs automatically conform themselves to fit your particular monitor. Cool. Every single window, every single tool dialogue, can be moved to any section of the screen you want, with the app refreshing itself in real time as you do so.

--Real-time viewing of clips and special effects, from these apps' windows; no more rendering, in other words, to see what the finished product looks like while played in real time. For example, the Adobe guys played us a clip with eight separate layers, and it still displayed at 15 fps while unrendered. And dynamic linking, too! You can now drop After Effects files right into your Premiere project, before they're finished, and see the entire movie play at real time; and then when you make a change to the After Effects file, your Premiere file is updated in real time as well. Unbelievable.

--Bridge now connects everything - all your old CS files, all your new PS files.

--If you want, you can have Encore automatically use the names of your original film clips as the chapter names of your finished DVD. Saves some time, if you have a bunch of chapters you're trying to create.

--Did you shoot the same scene from multiple angles at once, using multiple cameras? Premiere will now automatically sync these files, sync your editing of these files, will even display a master window now, where you can hop back and forth between the views in real time. Plus, once you do have a finished clip made from one of these angles, clicking on another angle will replace it with a new clip of the same exact length, reflecting the same exact moment of filming. Wow!

--Clip Notes: Quickly create a lo-fi version of your video in Premiere, output it directly into an interactive PDF that can be emailed to a client. Then whenever the client has a comment while watching it, all they have to do is pause the video and type said comment; Acrobat will then automatically marry that comment with the timecode the person was on when they hit pause, without that person having to remember themselves. This is so fucking cool, I think I might wet myself. Oh, and man - once the client mails the PDF back, and you open it on your own computer, Premiere will marry those comments right into the raw Premiere file itself, and display them as tiny little icons right in your timetrack. It's official - I just wet myself.

--Not only hundreds upon hundreds of pre-made effects with PS, but all of them now fully customizable; no more "take it or leave it" templates, in other words, an eternal problem among creative types when it comes to this subject.

--3D displays of sound files! Oh my fucking God! The tech stuff went right over my head, frankly; but basically, it lets you go in with Photoshop-type tools and literally cut random noises right out of your audio file, without affecting any of the other sounds taking place at the same time. Like science-fiction, man; I just saw it demonstrated in front of my own eyes, and I still can't believe it's real.

--Graphical interface for your special effects now, too, displayed as a Bezier line; ability to drag points to retime the effect, change hard points into curved to smooth out the effect, and of course drag the anchors of those curves to even customize the smoothing, just like using a Bezier line in a drawing application. Plus, if you have two effects applied at once, the interface will automatically align the points on both lines, in effect syncing the key moments of each.

--Drag and drop craziness in Encore! Drag chapter definitions to video clips; drag link destinations to menu items; drag transitions to your timetrack; drag audio files to slideshows, and even have Encore automatically time the slideshow to fit the length of the sound file. Then you can switch over to "Flowchart" view, immediately see any elements that have yet to be married to a menu item.

--Hilarious demonstration by their Flash expert. "How many of you have tried putting a video on the web? Yeah, you probably still remember that day, too, don't you?" Another: "My mom and dad are on a dial-up connection at home, and my mom recently wanted to watch a video. She asked my dad, 'Do I want the dial-up version or the cable version?' My dad replied, 'Look at all those cables sticking out of the back of the computer! Of course you want the cable version!' This is the problem with current video options, people!"

--According to Adobe, there are now more people online with Flash Player at home, then there are people online with MS Internet Explorer at home. They also claim that 96 percent of all people online now have Flash Player 6 or better. Not sure if I believe either of these stats, but they're intriguing statements nonetheless.

--Good point: Flash makes your video file look like it actually belongs on that web page, instead of some foreign object that's been artificially stuck into it.

--Direct export abilities now from Premiere straight into Flash Video (.flv). And an impressive demo, too: in five clicks of the mouse, go from a raw Premiere file to a fully finished web page, ready to be uploaded to the general online public.

--Did you know that Flash is now ten years old? Neither did I!

--Describing Flash's new encoding abilities: "Okay, let's admit it - this feature used to be not so easy to use. Well, okay, let's admit it - this feature used to be so difficult, not even rocket scientists could figure it out. And I'm not making a joke; one of our clients is NASA, in fact, and we once took a call from them saying, 'We can't figure this out!'"

--And another quote: "I've been using Flash for ten years, and this is the most impressive thing I've ever seen done with it."

So anyway, that was that; and as you can probably tell, the whole thing got me rather excited. And then after the presentation, Adobe even threw a cocktail party for all 300 of us, where for two hours all these geeks had the chance to just talk the ears off these Adobe guys, and bitch and suggest and demand answers to their questions. And man, you could tell that these Adobe guys were just eating it up; I mean, you could almost see on their faces just the pure glee they were taking in getting to talk with their customers, getting to have all these technical conversations with the very people actually using their software. And I didn't want to be left out, of course, so ended up cornering a guy named Greg Rewis (the Flash expert mentioned earlier, with all the great funny quotes), and he graciously agreed to do a little ten-minute, two-part interview with me for my podcast [randommedia]. (To download them straight from this entry, you can click here for part 1 and here for part 2; or you can click here for the episode's actual entry, which also includes a photo of Rewis and links to some of the things we talk about in the podcast.)

And that was a lot of fun as well; and then after the podcast Greg and I got to talking about some more insider-type stuff concerning Flash, Adobe, the merger, etc., although I'm not sure how appropriate it would be for me to pass along what was said, considering that we had all been drinking. Well, okay, I'll pass along this great little tidbit; that according to Greg, "Flash MX 2004 was pretty much a disaster, and all of us at Macromedia knew it. Our project manager quit in the middle of it, and developers were going crazy, and...you know, pardon my French, but we really stepped on our own private parts on that one. And that's a big reason why we're out here doing tours like this, is because we realize we need to win back our old customers, and convince them that, no, really, we're building things now that you guys have actually been asking for, versus what our developers thought would be cool." Which I thought was a pretty ballsy statement, to tell you the truth, considering that we were at an official event and that Greg knew that anything he said was technically fair game as far as getting published.

And that impresses me, frankly; it really impresses me, in fact, when an official at a company is willing to go on the record and admit that they've really screwed up in the past. And this of course gets into what all those smart marketing experts are saying all the time now, that the future of company success is all about conversation and not advertising, all about building a relationship with your customers, all about being honest and plain-spoken with your customers, to not hide your mistakes but to simply say, "Yeah, we made a mistake, and here's what we learned from it, and that's why we think we're a better company for it now." I really, really, really, really, really appreciate it when a company is willing to be like this, which is why I admired Greg so much for being this way himself.

So anyway, that was my day with Adobe! Please come back, Adobe! I want to see more!

So, I'm sure some of you have also been wondering how my experience with that little Yahoo Personals thing the other night went as well. (For those who missed it, Yahoo Personals sponsored an 'experiential marketing' event at the Pipers Alley Starbucks on Valentine's Day; that is, anyone who wanted could have their photo taken, have an 'expert' help them compose a personal ad, have the ad posted for free by Yahoo right at the store, and even receive a free $10 giftcard from Starbucks.) Ah, well, unfortunately the event turned out to be much more popular than anyone was expecting; the place was swamped, in fact, even at 7:00 when it started, and I ended up going on a waiting list that was supposed to take an hour. So I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and finally after two hours I asked one of the Yahoo people where I was on the list, and I was still six people away, which would've meant almost another hour of waiting. And realizing this, the Yahoo woman asked if I just wanted to grab my giftcard and go; and I know, the whole point of going was to actually go through the process of creating the ad, but I was just so fucking sick and tired of sitting in that Pipers Alley Starbucks at that point (which might as well have a big sign taped to the front that says, 'THIS IS WHY THE REST OF THE WORLD HATES MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE PEOPLE"), so I did indeed grab my giftcard and go. And that, unfortunately, was that.

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