Subscribe to RSSOne of the best things about working in post production is that most things do not start first thing in the morning. Sure, there are late nights, but at least I never have to show up to work at 8:00 am.
On that note, Adobe Video World kicked off yesterday at comfortable 9:30 am with a keynote from Directer/Editor Josh Feldman. He showed off his impressive new film Senn and how on a tiny budget of $15,000 he was able to create a quite impressive cerebral sci-fi film. While taking us through that and his upcoming project about constructed languages he threw tips at us ranging from production tricks to Premiere Pro strategies and even a quick detour to a nice pitch change trick in Apple's Logic Pro X.
The day continued with 5 sessions slots each with four options to chose from. And, of course, each slot had at least two topics I was interested in. Here are some highlights from the rest of the day:
- All of the presenters are on the Premiere Pro beta and were asked by Adobe to use that in their presentations so we could see all of the upcoming features. Very cool.
- Where I work the editors (and myself) love to throw Premiere's Warp Stabilizer on anything that moves, though usually no one bothers to tweak the settings and sometimes that means you get jello shots that would be better without the effect. I really enjoyed Richard Harrington's session going over every single option, slider, and check box in the effect with sample clips showing when each was appropriate. He also went through how to jump into After Effects and do a 3D Camera solve for tracking things onto objects in your scene.
- Maxim Jago had a nice session on the upcoming Optical Flow retiming feature coming to Premiere Pro. While I was familiar with a lot of the principles of working with high frame rate material that he covered, it was great to see the feature in practice.
- My favorite session of the day was Abba Shapiro's session on troubleshooting issues in Premiere Pro. Admittedly we got a bit derailed halfway through the session so I didn't pick up too much new stuff there. However we were derailed because of the Adobe engineers in the room chiming in and that was awesome. The session turned into a more casual back and forth between Abba, Adobe guys, and the attendees talking about real issues. If you've ever caught one of Dave Helmly's tech table videos or blog posts you can imagine it was great to have him fielding questions and opinions in the room.
- I spent the next session out in one of the hallways chatting with an awesome Adobe engineer about our friend QT32Server and why it always appears to be Not Responding if you see it in Activity Monitor on your Mac. The short answer is it's marked as Not Responding by the OS because it doesn't respond like a normal application, but actually that doesn't mean it has crashed or anything is wrong. I was assured that force quitting the process is actually much more likely to cause issues. Who knew?!
At the end of the day we headed to Adobe HQ a few blocks down the street for the first ever video based Creative Jam. I wasn't familiar with the concept of a Creative Jam (I think that was true for most of us) so it was a little confusing as to what was going on. It was, however, a great chance to mingle with everyone at the conference as well as some of the Adobe engineers.
Time for Day 2!
