Subscribe to RSSDay 3 was Adobe Day. This is what makes Adobe Video World stand out from other conferences and is the reason why I loved last year and came back this year. I don't know of anywhere else where you can spend a day interacting one on one with the Adobe video team.
What is even more amazing is how every one of them loves hearing from us. They come into the conference knowing they are going to be barraged by people with issues and questions but you never get the sense that it is a problem. Instead you are met with eager people excited to hear from the people that use what they make.
The day opened with a session where Dave McGavran walked us through the near future of the product, including the not official official release date for the next release (it's before December...).
Next up was a session with the team from Adobe going over how they build the product. We got into the nitty gritty of what makes a good bug report, how the team prioritizes new features, and a bit into how they decide which features move between all the video products (like Lumetri) and which are application specific. A nice amount of time was left for Q&A and we had a great discussion going.
I skipped out of the next session where two filmmakers were talking about their process with Creative Cloud and snagged an engineer from the Premiere team I had met the day before. I pitched him my idea for The Killer Feature That No NLE Has and we went in depth for about half an hour on how the feature would work and how it could be implemented. I'm excited that he was into it, and I hope to see it emerge sometime in a future version of Premiere!
After that we all went upstairs to a lunch with Adobe where someone from the team sat at each table and you could grab lunch with whoever you like. I snagged a table with Dave McGavran and really enjoyed his answers to my questions as well as the issues and ideas those at our table brought up. I asked him in particular why Premiere auto applied a Rec709 LUT to Amira clips (and no other camera) upon import. He enlightened us with the knowledge that the look came from the camera and was embedded in the .mov itself. So, if it were ignored you wouldn't even know it was there and he told me the Premiere team worked closely with Arri on the feature. He also pointed out the feature has been there for a few versions but they didn't get any feedback until more recently because no one had the camera to shoot with. It was also interesting to hear some of Dave's stories about working with Fincher and heading down to Rio to work with the team for the World Cup.
The afternoon kicked off with a JDI session. The team uses JDI as a short hand for a "Just Do It" feature which means it can be done by a single engineer and tester in roughly a day. These are often small improvements that can be implemented without drastic changes or risks of breaking other things. My session was being led by one of the engineers in charge of Media Encoder and also the Export Media dialogue in Premiere. It was great to be able to tell them, for example, that I found it very annoying that the "Queue" button in the Export Media dialogue was triggered by the return key when I felt it should be "Export". We discussed potentially adding Opt+Return for "Export" so at least it could have a keyboard shortcut. It's fascinating that this is something obvious and annoying to me but all the engineers in the room had an "Ohhhhh...." moment and hadn't put together how this could be a problem.
That's the awesome part of to Adobe Video World.
The rest of the afternoon entailed a Dolby Vision HDR presentation from Al Mooney and two engineers from Dolby. Very cool to see proper HDR material on a proper HDR monitor and know that the next version of Premiere will be able to handle it. Finally we had a great presentation from the engineer behind the Lumetri panel before heading to the Expo Night Reception.
