Adobe’s new cloud-based product, Adobe Anywhere, gives us a glimpse into the future of video editing. When I saw this announcement from Adobe, I thought of Stu Maschwitz and his post on Adobe CS6 and Creative Cloud – specifically, this quote:
Along with CS6, Adobe unveiled Creative Cloud, which includes subscription pricing for the Creative Suite applications. But is that really what After Effects power-users need from “the cloud?” What if that subscription also gave me access to a cloud-based render farm that is constantly Backblaze-syncing with my work directories and is ready to instantaneously render my 1,000-frame animation on 1,000 virtual machines at the push of a button?
Then what if Adobe removed the button?
It used to be my dream that After Effects would speculatively render my work in the background, using every ounce of my computer’s processing power. Now I want the same thing, but with Adobe supplying the processors. That would be worth a subscription fee.
When I read that back in May of this year, I thought “yeah, that’s it. That’s what the cloud needs to be doing for us.” (And, by the way, if you work in video, you need to be reading Stu’s words over at Prolost.)
To be fair, Adobe Anywhere doesn’t quite get us to Stu’s render farm dream world – yet. But, holy crap, the collaboration it offers certainly points us in the right direction. Your files are stored in the cloud and stream from the cloud thanks to Adobe’s new Mercury Streaming Engine.
The only data that is syncing back and forth between users appears to be project metadata – just a few ones and zeros. Check out the video below that demos Premiere Pro collaboration via Adobe Anywhere.
Dear Adobe, we want our render farm next.
