SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe will highlight new AI-based tools to enhance video editing, effects and audio processing during IBC2026, Sept. 11-14, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The company will unveil a new generative media tool that enables Adobe Premiere editors to select a video or audio as well as a video and audio gap in their timelines, describe what is needed and generate clips that fit the context of the edit.

Similarly, the AI Assistant in After Effects, now in public beta, allows motion designers to describe what they want in their on words and carry out the steps required from reorganizing projects with thousands of layers to creating motion effects and expressions without writing code.

New AI audio tools help editors clean up recordings by separating sound sources, adjusting reverb, removing unwanted elements like unlicensed music and splitting overlapping dialog into independent tracks for separate mixing and editing.

The intuitive new Generative Media Tool in Premiere generates context-aware, editable video and audio clips. Editors may choose from Adobe Firefly, Google Veo, Kling, Runway and Luma model to create with.

Among the tools available in the Premiere task bar are Generate Video, Generate Sound Effects, and Generate Soundscape and Generate Music, both of which are in beta.

New AI audio tools in Premiere enable editors to clean up noisy recordings, bad takes and overlapping dialog. The tools include Enhance Audio, offering noise reduction and independent control over dialog, sound effects and other audio characteristics of an individual clip; Separate Crosstalk to split speakers into their own tracks; Dynamic Audio Ducking to balance dialog and music automatically; as well as other sound tool improvements.

Adobe is also leveraging AI to address workflow challenges in After Effects. AI Assistant, available in beta for After Effects, offers newer users a more intuitive way to work in the program and gives experienced users a way to execute once tedious, multi-step operations more quickly.

AI Assistant enables users to describe what they want in plain language and reorganizes large projects without requiring code to be written.

See Adobe at IBC2026 stands 13.D501 and 7.B35.

More information is available on the company’s website.

SAN FRANCISCO—LucidLink has expanded its workflow integration with Adobe Frame.io, giving globally distributed production teams unified access to their Frame.io projects and offering support for production media in separate cloud storage environments.

By extending the Frame.io ecosystem, LucidLink said it provides a complete production workflow where editors and producers can access Frame.io assets alongside all supporting production media, including B-roll, audio, graphics and archives—all within a unified LucidLink file space.

Using LucidLink Connect, files stored in such cloud environments as Microsoft SharePoint, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and Amazon S3 appear instantly for the editor. No data migration, downloads or file duplication is required and existing cloud-storage systems remain unchanged.

This approach extends LucidLink’s file-streaming technology to assets outside Frame.io, bringing local, real-time performance to the rest of the production workflow. Creative teams can collaborate in Frame.io while keeping assets synchronized across the rest of the production toolchain, providing a true camera-to-timeline experience, LucidLink said.

“Creative teams don't work in a single application anymore,” LucidLink CEO Peter Thompson said. “They move across NLEs, MAMs, review and approval tools and VFX platforms. Our integration with Adobe Frame.io means customers can enjoy an exceptional review and collaboration experience, while LucidLink provides the persistent, tool-agnostic storage layer behind it. You get the best of both worlds: a seamless Frame.io workflow and a cloud filespace that serves every other tool in the production.”

As more vendors introduce their own integrated storage options, many media organizations are re-evaluating how to architect their workflows. While application-specific storage can simplify narrow use cases, it often creates silos when content needs to move beyond a single platform.

LucidLink Connect addresses this challenge by acting as an enterprise-grade access layer across the entire production workflow, the company said. Content reviewed and approved in Frame.io can simultaneously be used by other tools, such as NLEs, finishing systems, MAMs or AI services without additional exports, syncs or manual handoffs.

Key benefits of the LucidLink and Adobe Frame.io integration include immediate camera-to-timeline workflows, access to everything in one place, no need to move or duplicate files and enterprise-ready orchestration, the companies said.

“Over the years, Adobe and LucidLink have teamed up to help organizations like Brut, Casual and Minute Media, plus hundreds of other joint customers, do their best work. That success continuously informs our roadmap,” Thompson said. “This integration isn't about choosing one storage option over another. It gives customers the flexibility to design workflows that match the way they actually work. LucidLink Connect provides a neutral, high-performance storage layer that lets Adobe Frame.io shine at what it does best, while ensuring assets are always ready for the next stage in production.”

From high-end episodic and feature projects to live sports and fast-turnaround social content, organizations are increasingly relying on hybrid and fully cloud-based workflows, the company said. The LucidLink and Adobe Frame.io integration is designed for media and entertainment studios, broadcasters, sports and live event producers, agencies, brands, in-house creative teams and enterprise video teams.

More information is available on the LucidLink website.

Connected TV is already the most powerful format in advertising—and it’s about to become even more important.

That might sound counterintuitive. AI is reshaping every corner of digital advertising, and CTV has already gone through its “honeymoon phase” of rampant growth. But as the ecosystem becomes mediated by agents, the channels that shape consumer preference before agents will gain outsized importance.

That’s where CTV wins.

AI Is Compressing the Consumer Journey
Agentic commerce isn't a distant concept. It’s already emerging.

Consumers are delegating more decisions to AI: discovering products, comparing options, summarizing reviews, even completing purchases. What used to be a multi-step journey—search, click, browse, evaluate—is collapsing into a single interaction.

That has a direct impact on the mechanics of digital advertising. Fewer searches. Fewer clicks. Fewer pages viewed. Fewer opportunities to insert an ad into the process.

Search won’t disappear, but it is becoming abstracted. Display won’t vanish, but it is losing surface area. Commerce media isn’t going away, but it’s becoming more concentrated, with fewer, more decisive moments instead of a long trail of signals.

Performance marketing, as it stands today, is built on volume of impressions, clicks, and signals. That foundation is starting to erode. Not overnight. Not uniformly. But directionally, the trend is clear.

Influence Moves Upstream (and Becomes More Valuable)
As decision-making shifts to agents, the most valuable moment moves earlier in the journey, before the handoff.

Agents don’t watch TV. They don’t experience creative. They don’t build brand preference.

Humans do.

CTV remains one of the few scaled environments where brands can shape perception, create intent, and influence decisions before they’re delegated. While other channels face shrinking interaction surfaces, CTV retains (and expands) its leverage.

CTV Is Stuck in an Outdated Role
Despite its capabilities, CTV is largely treated as a branding channel. That no longer holds.

CTV has always had the ingredients of a performance channel: high-quality inventory, deterministic signals in logged-in environments, strong targeting, and the ability to connect exposure to outcomes. But still, advertisers have largely kept it in a branding box.

That is a structural mismatch.

Performance teams have spent years optimizing within environments built around clicks and direct response signals. CTV, while it has performance levers, doesn’t look or behave the same way, so it’s often held at arm’s length by performance teams.

The result is a split that no longer makes sense. As clicks and impressions become less reliable proxies for performance, advertisers can't afford to isolate CTV upstream while expecting downstream channels to drive outcomes alone.

As agent-driven behaviors reshape the advertising landscape, influence and conversion need to be connected, and CTV is one of the few channels that can bridge that gap at scale. It’s time for marketers to rethink and reprioritize CTV’s overall role within the broader marketing mix.

What Advertisers Should Do Now
The shift to an agent-driven digital ecosystem is already underway. Waiting for it to fully materialize before adjusting strategy will put brands behind. There are a few practical moves advertisers should be making now.

1. Reallocate a portion of performance budgets into CTV, not just brand budgets. If CTV is going to carry more of the load for driving outcomes, it needs to be funded accordingly. That means moving dollars out of lower-yield impression environments, not just adding incremental spend on top.
   
2. Hold CTV accountable to outcomes. Stop briefing CTV purely around reach and frequency. Define what success looks like in terms of business outcomes, whether that’s conversion lift, site engagement, or downstream revenue, and hold campaigns accountable to it.
   
3. Build creative that drives action, not just recall. CTV creative needs to do more than tell a story. It should create urgency, reinforce differentiation, and make the next step clear. That might mean rethinking pacing, messaging, and how calls to action are incorporated into the experience.
   
4. Integrate CTV into the performance loop. Don’t treat CTV as a standalone input. Use first-party data and signals from CTV exposure to inform targeting, sequencing, and optimization elsewhere. The goal is to turn CTV into a demand engine that other channels can capture more efficiently.
   
5. Reevaluate reliance on click-based signals. If your strategy depends heavily on large volumes of clicks and impressions, it’s worth modeling what happens as those decline. Identify where CTV can take on a greater role in influencing those outcomes earlier in the process. This is where view-through conversions will be impacted the most.

The Next Phase for CTV
As AI agents take over execution, advertising’s role shifts from capturing interactions to shaping decisions. That makes channels built around human attention more valuable, not less.

CTV’s next phase will belong to advertisers that stop treating it as a premium awareness channel and start using it as a strategic bridge between influence and action. In a world where agents may increasingly control the final mile of discovery, comparison, and purchase, brands must win earlier, with humans, in moments where attention still has depth. CTV gives advertisers that opportunity.

Adobe has expanded its work with Speechmatics to deliver cloud-grade speech recognition on-device for its Premiere editing software that the company says can run accurate on-device transcription locally and is powerful enough for professional work.

Speechmatics has been Adobe's partner since 2021, when Adobe became the first non-linear editing platform to include speech-to-text (STT) in Premiere. The new feature deepens with a new on-device STT model in Premiere that delivers near-cloud accuracy while keeping all audio local to the device.

When Adobe launched STT for Premiere, large enterprises couldn't always use cloud-based services due to privacy concerns. Speechmatics was one of the few providers with on-device models—a key reason for the partnership.

Five years later, those privacy requirements haven't changed. With the rise of LLMs and data sovereignty concerns, the need for secure deployments has, in fact, increased. What has changed is the performance gap: Speechmatics' new on-device model brings local transcription on par with cloud accuracy with optimisations to run efficiently.

This means, Adobe explained, that studios, agencies, and production companies handling content before it goes public can now work seamlessly from anywhere: on a film set, between client meetings, on a flight—at full accuracy, with no dependency on a connection and no interruption to the work.

The new Speechmatics on-device model has been trained on millions of hours of speech to deliver high accuracy for accented speech, non-native speakers, and noisy environments like field reporting or film sets. As a result, Adobe said that the new on-device model in Premiere:

• Is within 5% relative to cloud accuracy, evaluated across nearly 10 million words of diverse real-world data
• Processes 1 hour of audio in about 55 seconds
• Leads the way against the closest competitor, with a 12-16% improvement against Whisper-powered creative solutions
• Runs on Windows & Mac, making use of the latest AI acceleration techniques to ensure efficient processing across a range of hardware, including broad hardware support for the latest Mac M5, NVIDIA RTX, AMD GPUs and older hardware such as Intel Macs.

Speechmatics on-device joins Speechmatics cloud and Speechmatics on-prem as a purpose-built option for ISVs and OEMs where data residency, offline capability, or predictable costs make local execution the right architectural call. It integrates as a C/C++ library on macOS and Windows.

Adobe has announced a new feature in its Firefly video editor that uses AI to give content creators a starting point for their raw video footage. Firefly is Adobe’s toolkit of gen AI models and is available in a growing list of Adobe platforms.

Quick Cut for the Firefly video editor allows creators to upload their own b-roll or generate new footage and instantly turn it into a structured first cut.

“We designed Quick Cut to give video creators a clear starting point they can shape, refine and make their own,” the company said in a blog post. “It’s a fast way to get from ‘I have clips’ to ‘I have an edit I can work with.’”

By uploading footage and including a brief description to the Firefly video editor (i.e., interview, product demo, travel vlog, etc.), Quickcut uses the description to deliver a narrative-first assembly or offers an option for more guidance. Editors can also input a shot list or a script when for more precision.

Users can also select a specific aspect ratio; choose automatic pacing or set a specific duration and even add an optional B-roll track to keep supporting footage organized.

Quick Cut’s workflow is especially powerful for experimentation such as generating multiple directions from images and video clips, according to Adobe.

From now until March 16, Adobe is offering unlimited image and Firefly video generations up to 2K resolution in the Adobe Firefly app. The offer applies to customers on Firefly Pro, Firefly Premium, 4,000-credit, 7,000-credit, and 50,000-credit plans, and includes unlimited generations with image models, including Google Nano Banana Pro, GPT Image Generation, Runway Gen-4 Image, as well as Adobe's Firefly image and video models.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe today released more details regarding the commitment of its Film & TV Fund to provide $10 million in grants and donated products this year to help provide creative opportunities and career advancement for creators around the world.

The announcement comes the day before the opening of the Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 22-Feb. 1, in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. The company has also formed a new partnership with Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Dimz Inc. Academy and Rideback RISE.

The Adobe Film & TV Fund is an initiative launched in 2024 that supports underrepresented creators in film and TV, offering grants, career development, fellowships and Adobe Creative Cloud technology.

The company has created a new direct-to-creators funding pathway to solicit nominations from industry and community organizations to support projects built on Adobe tools like Premiere and Firefly.

Adobe’s community organizations will receive funding, including Ryan Reynolds & Blake Lively’s Group Effort Initiative, USC Annenberg School of Communications, NAACP and Gold House.

The company is expanding its support of the Sundance Ignite x Adobe Fellowship. It has introduced a new short film fund available to Ignite alumni. The yearlong Sundance Institute Ignite program identifies and supports new voices and talent from the next generation of filmmakers by providing artistic and professional development to advance emerging documentary and fiction filmmakers, 18 to 25 years old, worldwide. This will enhance efforts to reach more creators and produce projects from concept to screen in the upcoming years.

Adobe is also launching partnerships with two other organizations dedicated to fostering greater creative access and opportunity: Rideback RISE, which empowers mid-career artists of color to make commercial film and television projects through its RISE Fellowship, and Amelia Dimoldenberg’s transformative creative skills program Dimz Inc. Academy for 18- to 25-year olds from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in careers in digital media.

Four previous recipients of Adobe grants are premiering projects at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, including:

• Stephanie Ahn, writer-director, “Bedford Park” (supported via Gold House).
• Daniel Chavez, editor, “American Pachuco” (supported via Rideback Rise).
• Giselle Bonilla, director, “The Musical” (Adobe x Sundance Ignite fellow).
• Anooya Swamy, director, “Pankaja” (Adobe x Sundance Ignite fellow).

A new blog post from Adobe offers additional details.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe today unveiled AI-enhanced masking features for Premiere, new typography, materials and 3D features for After Effects that expand motion design and visual storytelling, and seamless connectivity between Premiere and Firefly Boards.

The announcement comes two days before the opening of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where 85% of this year’s films were created with the company’s products. Adobe also said it will further its commitment to empowering creatives from underserved communities, committing to $10 million in contributions and donating projects in 2026 through the Adobe Film & TV Fund.

The investment builds on the $10 million the company has already committed since launching the fund at Sundance two years ago. It is also launching a new direct grant application for filmmakers integrating AI into their creative workflows.

Firefly Boards is the company’s AI-powered ideation surface, which enables video teams to brainstorm and explore concepts collaboratively using AI models from Adobe, Google, OpenAI, Runway and others.

New innovations in Adobe Premiere and After Effects release 26.0 empower video professionals to accomplish tasks that were previously time-prohibitive. For example, rotoscoping can now be accomplished in seconds with new masking features, such as object selection and mask, shape masks, Firefly Boards integration and Adobe Stock integration.

The new After Effects release opens up new creative possibilities for motion designers and visual storytellers with native 3D parametric meshes, more than 1,300 free substance 3D materials, variable font animation and enhanced vector workflows.

After Effects’ new native 3D parametric meshes enable the design and customization of 3D shapes using parametric meshes and combinable shapes with new spot and parallel shadows to enhance assets like stylized graphics and photorealistic set pieces.

Its enhanced vector workflow support enables import of SVGs as native shape layers, preserving editable gradients and transparencies from Illustrator, making it possible for designers to animate with full vector fidelity and precise control over fills and strokes.

More information is available on Adobe Premiere and After Effects release 26.0 and its Sundance presence online.

LOS ANGELES—LucidLink, the file streaming platform, has announced a Frame.io integration and expanded mobile capabilities at Adobe Max.

With the LucidLink integration for Frame.io, footage captured in the field streams directly into editing timelines without the need for uploading or downloading, according to LucidLink. The expanded iOS Mobile app, now featuring multi-file uploads and background transfers on iOS 26, extends these capabilities to iOS users.

LucidLink says the integration will help accelerate downloads, which can hinder and delay editing workflows for creative teams.

This year, LucidLink won an Emmy for tackling this problem in television. Paramount, Warner Bros, and Discovery are among those that use LucidLink to manage over 80 petabytes of data across 150 countries. The new Frame.io integration and mobile capabilities bring the same instant-access approach to creative teams working with video across industries, from advertising and marketing to design, the company said.

The new LucidLink + Frame.io integration creates a mirror of selected Frame.io projects inside LucidLink, making media instantly editable in creative apps like Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

“Frame.io revolutionized capture with Camera-to-Cloud. With LucidLink, it becomes Camera-to-Timeline—media lands in your LucidLink workspace and is instantly ready to edit in Premiere Pro or After Effects,” said Richard Yu, Chief Product Officer at LucidLink. “Paired with our enhanced mobile apps, teams can capture anywhere and start cutting immediately—no downloads, relinking, or changes to how they work on the desktop.”

What this means for workflows is that media uploaded through Frame.io's Camera-to-Cloud appears instantly in LucidLink, allowing editors to cut directly in Premiere Pro or After Effects from a single, always-online source. Producers keep governance and approvals in Frame.io while teams can eliminate downloads, shipping physical hard drives, relinking and version drift, resulting in hours saved per day, fewer handoffs, and a smoother path from dailies to picture-lock, LucidLink said.

The LucidLink + Frame.io integration will be included with LucidLink Business and Enterprise plans. A technical preview will be demoed at Adobe MAX, with general availability targeted for Q1 2026.

Also new is LucidLink Mobile, which allows multiple files to be uploaded in the background with footage being sent straight into a filespace, with no intermediate copies, relinking or "download-then-upload" steps. Editors can start cutting immediately while the rest streams in, eliminating hours or even days of handoffs.

New iOS capabilities complement LucidLink's existing support on Android devices. They include:

• Multi-file uploads with background upload on iOS 26
• In-app previews
• Permission-aware sharing
• Core file operations

LucidLink will demo the Frame.io integration and Mobile apps, alongside other native Adobe workflow integrations, at Booth 3817 during Adobe MAX in Los Angeles, Oct. 28-30.

LONDON—7fivefive said it will expand its work for BBC Studios’ Global Media & Streaming team and that it is helping the U.K. public broadcaster’s studio arm scale its virtual infrastructure.

As part of that effort, 7fivefive is delivering the remote editing backbone that supports postproduction and content-based workflows. In addition, 7fivefive is working in tandem with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the selected cloud provider, to help BBC Studios realize its cloud-first strategy.

7fivefive’s cloud expertise now underpins the Global Media & Streaming teams’ postproduction process, enabling creative teams to manage resources efficiently and collaborate across different time zones. Throughout the project, 7fivefive has provided strategic consultation, designing and implementing solutions that maximize responsiveness and reduce overheads, the integrator said.

The system is designed to dynamically scale active resources, with automated controls enhancing productivity. Virtual workstations can be provisioned and optimized based on real-time requirements, empowering users to self-serve without compromising on performance. Different teams receive customized resources that are best suited to specific creative tasks, across editing, graphics, color grading, compliance and branding.

The latest phase of the project harnesses the capabilities of Adobe and AWS within a unified cloud environment. Regional departments can seamlessly transition between projects, access secure content from anywhere, manage allocation and act on data-driven insights. Predictive cost metrics and automated budget management are based on detailed analytics. This ensures that business objectives are met without compromising on creative quality or operational goals.

“7fivefive's cloud expertise and practical insight has been key in helping us modernize our creative technology stack and post-production workflows, allowing us to implement meaningful optimizations with confidence and efficiency,” said Emma Ellis, creative services technology manager, Global Technology, at BBC Studios. “These enhancements have increased flexibility across our creative teams, allowing seamless access to remote editing resources and global media content from anywhere. This shift has not only introduced additional operational efficiencies, but has ensured we can continue delivering high-quality, engaging content to our audiences worldwide.”

Added 7fivefive Managing Director Tim Burton: "We are extremely proud to continue our long-standing partnership with BBC Studios, providing the technology, insights, and strategic support that helps to power its cloud-first approach to post-production infrastructure. These workflows enable creative teams to focus on the task at hand, whilst the complexity of integrated cloud resources is handled via an intuitive interface. Our shared commitment to innovation ensures that hey are well-equipped for the challenges of tomorrow’s media landscape.”

Adam Jakubowski, vice president of technical operations, Global Technology at BBC Studios, said: “The collaboration with 7fivefive has played a key role in our cloud trajectory. We have scaled virtual post-production workflows over the past five years, and adaptive resource allocation continues to provide significant cost and workflow efficiency gains. The flexibility of this solution means we can respond to evolving business and industry needs and enhance the autonomy and agility of our creative teams.”

More information is available here.

SAN JOSE, Calif.— Roku and Adobe have announced that they are collaborating on a real time data platform made possible by a a new integration of the Roku Data Cloud and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP).

The integration will allow advertisers and publishers to jointly discover, activate, and measure high-value audiences while prioritizing privacy, the companies said. This will offer improved insights into streaming behavior, enabling them to drive more effective media strategies and discover new audiences.

“Our partnership with Adobe is another step forward for the Roku Data Cloud. Advertisers can now better understand their audience, make use of valuable proprietary Roku data, and ultimately maximize their TV investment,” said Miles Fisher, senior director of strategic advertising partnerships at Roku. “This integration will unlock the opportunity for traditional performance marketers – like search and social buyers – to plan, activate, and measure campaigns on Roku."

The Adobe integration builds off the recent launch of Roku Data Cloud, which provides a seamless connection for partners to access, analyze, and leverage Roku’s proprietary data to enhance CTV media efforts.

“As consumers play a more active role in customizing their privacy preferences, brands are now focused on leveraging consent-driven data to personalize ad experiences and drive performance,” said Ryan Fleisch, senior director of product marketing, Adobe Real-Time CDP and Audience Manager. “Adobe Real-Time CDP Collaboration empowers brands to jointly discover high-value audiences without moving or exposing directly identifiable customer data, and with Roku as a publisher partner, users can easily activate and measure campaigns that connect directly with streaming audiences.”

Roku and Adobe described the key features of the Real-Time CDP Collaboration as follows:

• Real-time audience planning: With real-time insight into Roku’s engaged CTV audiences – and how they overlap – advertisers will be able to plan audience-based campaigns built to achieve specific business objectives.
• Seamless audience activation: Brands will be able to build custom audiences using Roku Data Cloud in Adobe’s Real-Time CDP Collaboration and seamlessly activate them across Roku’s ad product suite.
• Optimized campaign measurement: Coming soon, on-demand dashboards will integrate Roku data with advertiser conversion data, to gain clear visibility into campaign attribution and overall performance and to inform future optimizations

AUBURN, Wash.—Puget Systems is showcasing desktop and mobile computing solutions custom-tailored for high-end VFX, Virtual Production, AI and LLM workflows as well as for Broadcast at this year’s 2025 NAB Show.

In addition to its booth in the South Hall of the LVCC (Booth #SL5923), Puget Systems is teaming up with several of its strategic partners at NAB to demonstrate its breadth of its solution. Attendees at this year’s conference can expect to see Puget Systems represented with major industry players including Adobe, Form Studios, Corridor Digital, and ASUS Global.

Some highlights of its presence include:

• Teaming up with Corridor Digital: The Corridor Crew will be live at the Puget Systems booth. Historically, Puget Systems has partnered with Corridor Digital to help them push the boundaries of what is possible with high-end VFX. This year at NAB 2025 they’ll be doing just that in the Puget Systems booth. Corridor Digital founder Niko Peuringer, as well as Wren Weichman, Christian Fergerstrom, and Nick Laurant will be showing off some sophisticated and visually stunning interactive AI and VFX demos at the booth on Monday and Tuesday from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm PT.
• Puget Bench for Creators: Puget Systems will also debut for NAB attendees its newest tools for analyzing and visualizing the hundreds of thousands of results in their public results database for Puget Bench for Creators, which is designed to benchmark professional workloads in the most common video editing, photography, VFX and motion graphics applications. These new tools from Puget Bench for Creators offer business-critical guidance for IT decision makers by providing access to high value, real-word data for making educated decisions about hardware for their creative teams.
• Partnering with Adobe in the NAB 2025 Creator Lab (Booth #SL9823): Puget Systems is teaming up with Adobe at NAB 2025 in support of the Creator Community. With this partnership, Puget Systems will be providing all of the computer hardware necessary to power Adobe’s Creator Training Stations in the NAB 2025 Creator Lab in the South Hall. Throughout the conference, Adobe will be hosting a full schedule of Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects training on 16 individual training stations all powered by Puget Systems new Puget Mobile 16” laptops. Boosted by the Intel® Core™ Ultra processor, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 5080 Mobile GPU, the new Puget Mobile 16” laptops are the ideal hardware platform for the Creator Community who depend on high performance, reliable and stable hardware solutions for their Adobe Creative Cloud application workflows. As Adobe Creative Cloud applications will be optimized for NVIDIA’s new Blackwell architecture later this year, the combination of these applications with the Puget Mobile 16” laptop will ensure significantly enhanced performance and increased hardware decoding support for 4:2:2 codecs.
• Form Studios and Nikon: In partnership with Form Studios, an innovative virtual production and MOCO-integrated studio, Puget Systems custom rackstations will be powering a number of virtual production cinema and broadcast demonstrations in the Nikon booth #N2038.
• Form Studios, Vive and Aximmetry: A Puget Systems workstation will be powering a virtual production green screen setup - also in partnership with Form Studios - and presented in the Vive Mars Booth in the West Hall, Booth #W4131.
• ASUS Global: Puget Systems is also teaming up with ASUS Global, using a Puget Systems workstation configured with an ASUS motherboard and video card and running NVIDIA’s DLSS demo in the ASUS Booth #SL6823.

The team from Puget Systems will also be participating in informative talks with panels of experts, as well, sponsoring opportunities to network and hang out outside the show floor:

• Join School of Motion, Rive, Puget Systems, and hundreds of artists for the 7th MoGraph Meetup at NAB. (Sunday, April 6th at 8 PM; 3790 South Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV 89109; Free ticket reservation required.)
• Join Matt Bach for an ASUS ProArt Master Talk to hear about the latest GPU technologies, and learn when it is time for an upgrade. (Tuesday, April 8th at 2 PM; ASUS Booth SL6823)

SAN JOSE—Adobe today announced the official launch of its Generative Extend AI tool for Premiere Pro. The feature—announced at its Adobe Max conference last fall, was originally rolled out in beta for Firefly—uses AI to instantly generate and expand the length of video and audio clips, and AI-powered Media Intelligence for quickly finding specific clips in terabytes of footage in seconds.

Adobe will showcase Generative Extend at Booth SL2210 in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the 2025 NAB Show, April 6-9.

With Generative Extend, which is powered by the Firefly Video Model and safe for commercial use, editors can now extend video in 4K and in landscape and vertical orientation—along with audio clips—transforming how they cover gaps in footage. After Effects now offers improved performance and 3D tools, and Frame.io delivers new upgrades for storage, transcription, and expanded support for document formats.

Adobe says its Generative Extend and Media Intelligence, some of the creative community’s most sought-after video capabilities, are now generally available, backed by years of research and insights from beta customers. Additional upgrades now generally available in Premiere Pro include AI-powered Caption Translation, which automates the work of generating multilingual captions, helping video pros effortlessly connect with audiences worldwide in seconds. Premiere Color Management, also now generally available, takes the guesswork out of color by transforming raw and log footage from nearly every camera into HDR and SDR the moment clips are imported. The new features, coupled with overall performance improvements, make editing in Premiere Pro faster and more efficient than ever.

"We’re so excited to see how the Premiere Pro community uses Generative Extend in 4K and AI-powered Media Intelligence to create stories that capture our imaginations," said Ashley Still, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Media at Adobe. "By harnessing the power of Firefly and our advanced AI capabilities, we're transforming the video editing experience and enabling our customers to focus on what matters most to them – telling vivid, compelling stories."

New Version of After Effects
Today Adobe also introduced a new version of After Effects with a high-performance preview playback engine, powerful new 3D motion design tools and HDR monitoring. New Frame.io V4 upgrades include expanded storage that scales with teams—removing workflow fractures and ensuring creatives can share, manage and organize their work-in-progress and finished assets without limitations.

Generative Extend, now generally available in Premiere Pro in 4K and with support for vertical video, solves a common but frustrating challenge in video editing: a great clip that’s just a bit too short. Generative Extend is the first professional editing tool of its kind, lengthening clips to cover video or audio gaps in footage, smooth out transitions and hold shots longer for perfectly timed edits. Just click and drag to add photorealistic video and audio extensions—delivering unparalleled flexibility in timeline adjustments without sacrificing quality. Support for vertical video ensures editors can use Generative Extend to create and export social-first content without needing to manually re-frame shots.

Since its beta launch in October 2024, Adobe says customers have been using Generative Extend to extend B-roll footage to perfectly match narration timing, stretch establishing shots to create breathing room in fast-paced sequences, extend ambient audio to create seamless transitions between scenes and adjust timing without sacrificing composition or requiring additional footage.

Generative Extend is powered by the Firefly Video Model, which is commercially safe and IP-friendly. To promote transparency around AI-generated content, Content Credentials, which act like a “nutrition label” for digital media—are attached to Generative Extend outputs.

"Adobe’s new Firefly-powered video tools like Generative Extend have been transformative for our creative and post-production workflows,” said Justin Barnes, Executive Creative Director & Partner, Versus Creative Studio. “They seamlessly integrate into our existing pipeline, allowing us to rapidly experiment, iterate, and develop creative ideas faster than ever. The ability to automate time-consuming tasks has unlocked all new efficiencies and given back time to the creative process, allowing us to further push the limits of storytelling.”

Upgrades now generally available in Premiere Pro and After Effects empower filmmakers to navigate terabytes of footage in seconds, reach new audiences and streamline visual effects and motion graphics workflows.

For editors, Adobe says the AI-powered Media Intelligence feature in Premiere Pro fundamentally changes how they interact with their project footage and delivers game-changing time savings. Instead of painstaking manual searches, Media Intelligence automatically recognizes clip content—including objects, locations, camera angles or metadata like shoot date or camera type—so editors can find what they need when they need it.

“I’m really excited by the AI products that Adobe is developing for filmmakers—especially new features like Media Intelligence, which helps me get to the edit that much faster,” said Ernie Gilbert, filmmaker and editor of A24’s “Opus.” “As an editor, it’s my job to stay on top of new technologies that help give us more time to focus on the creative process with my collaborators down the pipeline. These tools will help remove some of the tedium of the process, allowing us to focus on what’s ultimately going to affect the audience most.”

Additional upgrades now generally available in Premiere Pro include:

• AI-powered Caption Translation can translate subtitles into 27 different languages in seconds. Captions are more important than ever as filmmakers scale their content for reach, engagement and accessibility globally—but until now, editors have been slowed down by manual translations, disrupting their workflows and adding expenses.
• Color Management offers an entirely new color system that enables higher fidelity and more consistent color than ever before, automatically transforming log footage from nearly every camera into HDR and SDR. This enables an editor to get started faster with beautiful footage—and makes it easier than ever to create great videos with perfect skin tones, more vibrant color and improved dynamic range.

Upgrades now generally available in After Effects include:

• High-Performance Preview Playback makes playback of an entire composition quicker than ever, on any computer.
• An expanded range of 3D tools like Animated Environment Lights offers faster and more realistic 3D compositing.
• HDR Monitoring makes it easy to accurately play back and work with high dynamic range content for brighter and more vivid motion design work.

New for Frame.io
Expanded storage in Frame.io V4, which scales with creative teams, makes it possible to collaborate on massive amounts of media all in the same place—eliminating the need to fracture workflows by storing files across a variety of cloud platforms. At a time when many creative teams are struggling to deliver content at scale and keep pace with demand, Frame.io V4 empowers teams to store, manage, collaborate and distribute everything from scripts, location stills, source media and more all within a single platform.

Additional upgrades in Frame.io include:

• Expanded text document review tools for collaborating on scripts, briefs, budgets, proposals, treatments, storyboards and other artifacts.
• Transcription generation (beta) makes it easy to quickly transcribe video and audio files in Frame.io, with one-click navigation and text search and the option to export to multiple format types.
• Watermarking helps protect work-in-progress content with custom text watermarks on videos, images, and documents.
• Access Groups (beta) for enterprise customers help Account Administrators of large teams automate bulk user access across Workspaces and Projects, dramatically reducing the time they spend managing permissions. New enterprise security features also include the ability to restrict access to selected folders.

Pricing and Availability
Adobe’s latest releases in Premiere Pro and After Effects are generally available today. Premiere Pro will offer complimentary generations with Generative Extend for a limited time. Transcription and Access Groups features are available today in Frame.io V4 beta; all other Frame.io features are generally available today.

Adobe has expanded its Firefly family of creative generative AI models to video, in addition to new breakthroughs in its Image, Vector and Design models. The Firefly Video Model, now in limited public beta, is the first publicly available video model designed to be “commercially safe,” Adobe said.

Perhaps the biggest news that came out of Monday’s Adobe Max conference for broadcasters was the addition of generative AI to Premiere Pro, one of the most popular video-production systems in the Media & Entertainment industry. However, the “Generative Extend” AI beta is not full-on generative AI, but rather a feature that allows creators to extend clips to cover gaps in footage, smooth out transitions or hold onto shots longer for perfectly timed edits.

The company said it trains its Firefly generative AI models on licensed content, such as Adobe Stock or public-domain content, and its features are developed under its AI Ethics principles of accountability, responsibility and transparency—aka what it calls “Content Credentials.”

“Since founding the Content Authenticity Initiative in 2019, Adobe has championed the widespread adoption of Content Credentials as the industry standard for transparency in digital content, now supported by over 3,700 members,” the company said. “Content Credentials, which act like a ‘nutrition label’ for digital content to show how it was created and edited, are applied to select Firefly-powered features across Creative Cloud to indicate the use of generative AI.”

Since Firefly’s first beta release in March 2023, Adobe said it has been used to generate more than 13 billion images—an increase of more than 6 billion over the past six months.

“The usage of Firefly within our creative applications has seen massive adoption, and it’s been inspiring to see how the creative community has used it to push the boundaries of what’s possible,” Adobe Chief Technology Officer, Digital Media Ely Greenfield said. “We’re thrilled to bring creative professionals even more tools for ideation and creation, all designed to be commercially safe.”

The beta for Adobe’s Firefly Video Model (beta) extends Adobe’s family of generative AI models, which already includes an Image Model, Vector Model and Design Model, “making Firefly the most comprehensive model offering for creative teams,” it said. It is available today through a limited public beta to garner initial feedback from a small group of creative professionals, which will be used to continue to refine and improve the model, according to Adobe.

Within one year of being launched, Firefly was brought into Photoshop, Express, Illustrator, Substance 3D and more, while supporting various workflows in Creative Cloud applications. Firefly also supports text prompts in over 100 languages.

Other new features include:

• Text to Video and Image to Video (beta), for user controls and stunning video clips: Powered by the Firefly Video Model and now rolling out in limited public beta in the Firefly web app, creators can access new Text to Video and Image to Video capabilities. With Text to Video, video editors can generate footage from text prompts, access various camera controls, such as angle, motion and zoom, to fine-tune videos, and reference images for b-roll generation to seamlessly fill gaps in a video timeline. Image to Video capabilities allow creators to bring still shots or illustrations to life by transforming them into stunning live-action clips.
• Firefly Image 3 enhancements for faster generations: With the latest evolution of Firefly Image 3 Model, creators of all levels can ideate by generating images in seconds with results that are up to 4 times faster than previous models—now available on the Firefly web app.
• Generative Workspace (beta) in Photoshop: Adobe Firefly-powered Generative Workspace in Photoshop allows designers to simultaneously ideate, brainstorm and iterate concepts.
• Firefly Vector Model (beta) advancements in Illustrator: Adobe Illustrator brought Generative Shape Fill (beta), Generative Recolor and Text to Pattern, all powered by the latest Firefly Vector Model (beta) earlier this year, allowing designers to quickly ideate or add detailed vectors in their own unique style to existing artwork and designs. The latest version of Firefly Vector Model allows creators to further control the density of elements in a single pattern to change how tightly those elements are packed together.

Adobe at the conference also previewed “Project Concept,” a new capability for multiplayer, collaborative, creative concept development that lets creative professionals remix images in real time, so they can conceptualize live within a single canvas.

In Firefly Services, a collection of creative and generative APIs for enterprises, Adobe unveiled new offerings to scale production workflows. This includes Dubbing and Lip Sync, now in beta, which uses generative AI for video content to translate spoken dialogue into different languages while maintaining the sound of the original voice with matching lip sync. “Bulk Create, Powered by Firefly Services” is also now in beta and will let professioonals edit large volumes of images more efficiently, streamlining tasks such as resizing or background removal.

The Firefly Video Model is in limited public beta via waitlist at firefly.adobe.com. During this limited public beta, generations are free. Adobe will share more information about Firefly video generation offers and pricing when the Firefly Video Model moves out of limited public beta.

TV Tech sister brand TechRadar Pro has more.

The Television Academy has announced the recipients of the 76th Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards honoring an individual, company or organization for developments in broadcast technology. 

The awards ceremony, hosted by Criminal Minds star Kirsten Vangsness, will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024, at the Television Academy's Saban Media Center in North Hollywood, California.

"The Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards are a testament to the incredible ingenuity and creativity that power our industry," said Cris Abrego, chair of the Television Academy. "We are thrilled to honor these innovators who have pushed the boundaries of what's possible, shaping the future of television for generations to come."

"This year we honor a diverse group of technologies that enable and advance the storytelling process for television production," said committee co-chairs Barry Zegel and Wendy Aylsworth. "Electro/Mechanical Camera Stabilization systems, software programs that aid the editing and creation process, support for LED Volumes production, the MDDF (MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework) Standard, and the use of generative artificial intelligence tools are all included in this year's awards. This wide range of technologies demonstrates the amazing achievements throughout our industry."

This year, the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors a living individual whose ongoing contributions have significantly affected the state of television technology and engineering, is being given to Jensen Huang. Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.

Since its founding, NVIDIA has pioneered accelerated computing. The company's invention of the GPU (graphics processing unit) in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics and ignited the era of modern AI. NVIDIA is now driving the platform shift of accelerated computing and generative AI, transforming the world's largest industries and profoundly impacting society.

Huang has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is a recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association's highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award; the IEEE Founder's Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University and Oregon State University. He has been named the world's best CEO by Fortune, the Economist and Brand Finance and one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people.

Prior to founding NVIDIA, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.

The Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award, which honors an agency, company or institution whose contributions over time have significantly impacted television technology and engineering, is being given to Adobe Inc.

For over 40 years, Adobe has been a leader in delivering groundbreaking technology that empowers everyone, everywhere to express themselves and bring their stories to life, the Academy said. From students to creative professionals, and from small businesses to the world's largest enterprises, Adobe's customers use Adobe tools to unleash their creativity, accelerate document productivity and power digital businesses — including Adobe Acrobat; Creative Cloud tools such as Premiere Pro, Photoshop, After Effects and Adobe Express; Substance 3D collection; collaboration tools like Frame.io; and Experience Cloud enterprise solutions, such as Adobe GenStudio.

Adobe's tools have powered a record number of award-winning television shows and movies including 2024 Emmy-nominated projects, such as Saturday Night Live, FX's The Bear and HBO's Ramy Youssef: More Feelings and The Jinx — Part Two as well as noteworthy films and docuseries including Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, Dìdi (弟弟) and Penelope.

The Academy said that the Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards are presented to an individual, company or organization for developments in engineering, science and technology that are either so extensive an improvement on existing methods or so innovative in nature that they materially affect the production, recording, transmission or reception of television and thereby have elevated the storytelling process. 

The Academy described this year's recipients as follows:  

Recipient: Adobe Inc. for the development of the Adobe Substance Painter. Substance Painter is a non-destructive 3D texture painting application. Initially built for game developers, Substance Painter has seen very quick adoption in visual effects and animation within the television industry despite its relatively young age. Substance Painter's unique approach of procedural-driven materials differs from previous metaphors for texture generation: It leverages algorithmic methods vs. manual painting and cloning. This has enabled fast and creative texture creation by a broader spectrum of artists without requiring traditional art and painting skill sets. This new workflow has helped increase creativity and accelerate asset generation via quicker iterations in visual effects. As a result, Substance 3D Painter is leading the industry in texture painting, allowing the ability to texture a model in real-time. From animation to visual effects studios, the industry uses Painter to bring their creations to life.

Recipients: Tom Ohanian, Ken Goekjian, Joel Swan and Victor Young for the development of the Avid Multicamera System. Introduced in 1994, the Avid Multicamera System has stood the test of time. With its worldwide usage, it continues to be a dominant technology and product offering in the industry. The Multicamera System replaced systems that utilized videotape and laserdisc players. This digital multicamera invention improved upon all the previous limitations: It provided nonlinear, digital, random access to material with multiple tracks of audio. Due to the invention's functionality of auto-synchronization, the time-consuming synchronization of different camera angles was automated. Editing could proceed directly from camera iso (isolated) feeds as well as a line cut (directly from the video switcher), if necessary due to time constraints. These items significantly advanced the art of storytelling, proving why creative people utilize Avid's Multicamera System to make today's most celebrated video and audio content.

Recipients: Paul Pan, Yanchong Zhao, Tie Su, Shimeng Bei for the development of the DJI Ronin Series. The DJI Ronin is a line of professional camera stabilization systems designed for filmmakers and videographers to stabilize cameras, enabling camera operators to capture smooth, steady footage. The Ronin uses a three-axis gimbal system to stabilize pan, tilt and roll, keeping the camera level and steady, often eliminating the need to lay dolly track or set up a Technocrane. The Ronin's modular design allows for easy setup and adjustment and can be adapted for a variety of shooting scenarios and camera setups. Ronin's payload capacity supports a variety of camera and lens combinations from small mirrorless cameras to larger cinema cameras. Ronin gimbals offer a variety of operation modes, such as Pan Follow, Lock Mode and POV (Point of View) Mode; and they are compatible with a range of accessories, such as wireless focus systems, monitors and other filmmaking tools.

Recipients: Stuart Geman, Kevin Manbeck, John Mertus, and Michael Braca for the development of the DRSNova Film and Video Restoration Software. DRSNova film and video restoration software boasts a comprehensive suite of features tailored to meet the diverse needs of modern filmmakers and post-production experts. From its inception, this innovative software has been at the forefront of advancements in digital restoration and film-processing technology, continuously evolving to keep pace with the ever-changing demands of the industry. It seamlessly integrates into the workflows of film labs, post-production houses, and archival facilities, providing robust solutions for a wide array of restoration tasks. Whether it's restoring aging film stock, enhancing visual quality, or preparing content for television broadcast and streaming, or Blu-ray distribution, DRS™Nova excels in delivering exceptional results with unmatched efficiency. By empowering professionals to achieve their creative vision while maintaining the integrity of the original content, DRS™Nova has played a pivotal role in preserving cinematic heritage and elevating the quality of visual storytelling across various platforms.

Recipient: Benjamin Graf for the development of Accentize's dxRevive Pro. dxRevive Pro is a sophisticated speech-restoration plugin engineered to enhance the fidelity of dialogue recordings across a range of scenarios. Unlike other restoration-style software, dxRevive Pro doesn't just filter the signal, it also identifies and reintegrates missing frequency components. As a result, users can produce studio-like recordings (where the audio is not only "cleaned" but the dialogue itself is enhanced) from a diverse array of source materials. Previously, achieving such clarity required painstaking effort and might not have been achievable at all, resulting in the need for ADR sessions and the additional cost and time those incur. By swiftly and effectively improving dialogue quality, dxRevive Pro elevates the overall audio experience for viewers, ensuring that they can be fully immersed in the story without distraction or discomfort. In essence, dxRevive Pro not only mitigates the impact of budget constraints on dialogue quality but also enhances the storytelling process by providing a more comfortable listening experience, ultimately enriching the narrative and its emotional impact.

Recipients: Jeremy Hochman, Chris Byrne, Colin Cook and Justin Nicolaides for the development of Megapixel's HELIOS LED Processing Platform. The HELIOS platform is an advanced video processing system for LED walls. For over 20 years, the platform has revolutionized LED displays, making them reliable and repeatable tools for filmmakers. HELIOS' advancement of LED processing has removed the restrictions of greenscreen production, enabling storytellers to have full creativity — live in camera. HELIOS supports video sources up to 8K resolution and is capable of handling up to four simultaneous SMPTE ST 2110 inputs. This makes it ideal for large-scale displays and complex visual applications that require high-resolution and precise synchronization. HELIOS' innovative GhostFrame technology allows multiple unique video feeds to be displayed on LED panels simultaneously, streamlining virtual production workflows by enabling the recording of multiple backgrounds from a single take. Its advanced color-management system ensures accurate color fidelity, consistently preserving and applying metadata from source to final display. With full HDR support and seamless integration with image-based lighting systems, HELIOS delivers stunning visuals.

Recipients: Craig Seidel for the development of the MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework. The MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework (MDDF) was born from the evolution from physical to digital distribution. Starting in mid-2008, MDDF was originally conceived to support online sales of downloadable content, but it rapidly evolved into a comprehensive collection of essential data standards that drove online streaming. Prior practice was for content owners to provide distribution services an assortment of spreadsheets, emails and other unstructured data. When volumes were small these manual methods could work; but as distribution services evolved to handle tens or hundreds of thousands of titles (millions of assets), those practices were no longer feasible. MDDF provides the solution. MDDF is a suite of digital distribution specifications that define avails (licensing); metadata; asset ordering, delivery and status; bonus/extras; workflows; and APIs. MDDF was designed to get movies and television in front of home viewers in the form most suitable for their needs. It allows a breadth of content to be prepared and delivered by digital service providers to viewers with rich metadata that supports discovery allowing viewers to select the most interesting content. MDDF supports full localization, both in metadata and in handling the complexity of localized and accessibility-focused assets and supports everything from the most primitive formats to the most advanced. MDDF allows people to enjoy content in a way that preserves the creative intent and matches the needs of the individual.

Recipient: The Tiffen Company for the development of the Steadicam Volt. The Steadicam Volt system is an accessory to the already ubiquitous Steadicam that utilizes electronic stabilization technology to assist camera operators in achieving and maintaining smooth, consistent and level camera shots. When mounted on a Steadicam or other brand of camera stabilizer, the Volt will help to maintain a level or preset horizon and filter out unwanted camera movements without affecting normal Steadicam operation or control. Steadicam Volt™ consists of two main components: A "brain" that is mounted fixed in relation to the camera, which houses all gyro and accelerometer motion-sensing components and a gimbal-mounted "motor drive" unit to apply corrections to the tilt-and-roll axis of the camera stabilizer. With the camera stabilizer sled neutrally balanced, the Volt requires very little battery power to manipulate even the heaviest of camera payloads. Difficult shots that involve high-acceleration camera movement — such as running or fast lateral movements — are now easier to obtain smoothly. Operators do not need to focus as much on inertial influences or external forces, such as wind and how they affect camera positioning. The Steadicam Volt™ enables a camera operator to better focus, react and interact with dynamically changing or challenging shooting environments to produce better framing of shots. 

The Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards are made possible by Television Academy sponsors FIJI Water, Franciacorta, Johnnie Walker Blue Label, JUSTIN Vineyards & Winery, People, The Ritz-Carlton and United Airlines.

COLOGNE, Germany—Workflow specialist and Adobe SI partner MoovIT will be exhibiting for the first time at this year’s 2024 NAB Show, where it will showcase its Helmut4 video project management software, alongside helmut.cloud, its new holistic platform for workflow automation, integration and connection.  

MoovIT’s expertise as a service provider and software development partner for broadcasters, video production and international sports events is already well established in Europe and the decision to exhibit at the 2024 NAB Show reflects its plans to expand its presence in the American market, where it is working with CHESA, the specialist and solution partner for professional media workflows. 

“It is MoovIT's philosophy that all tasks within a video production process can be defined as a combination of workflows, regardless of the type and size of a company. Triggered by any event, good workflows are the basis for organizing teams, tasks and solutions,” says David Merzenich, managing director at MoovIT MSP.

This core principle has been key to the successful development of Helmut4, the project management software, combined with FX, IO, Cosmo and Housekeeper components for efficient management, backup and control of editing projects in professional Adobe video production environments. Helmut4 is successfully established in the European video production industry and considered a game-changer by customers making the switch from Avid to the Adobe landscape, the company said. 

Building on that, MoovIT is now launching helmut.cloud, a platform for workflow design and orchestration. Uniquely, it offers an open architecture that allows customers to integrate any software they use or require into the workflow. With helmut.cloud, the customer can automate, connect, create and even program their own production solutions with no restrictions – securely and tailored to their specific needs.

The company reports that helmut.cloud is designed to enable production teams to organize, design, trigger, execute and monitor all workflows according to their wishes using the Streamdesigner Studio node-based application. 

In addition, the platform provides an event gateway to connect any video software within minutes, including the Helmut4 toolkit to extend them with an out-of-the-box workflow engine. This creates unlimited new possibilities for creative, customized workflow designs for broadcasters, media professionals and many other industries.

MoovIT also said that helmut.cloud is especially powerful when interacting with Adobe products such as Premiere or Frame.io. Using the helmut.cloud platform, the creative power of the Adobe CC product range can be expanded to include extremely powerful workflows in minutes.

High5 is the go-to application in helmut.cloud for connecting and extending modern and legacy apps. It allows users to create apps, define events, and easily build powerful workflow orchestrations using Streamdesigner Studio. High5 also offers a dashboard for monitoring stream executions and allows users to trigger events using incoming webhooks. It also provides the unique flexibility to run streams on any computer, on-premises or in the cloud – for distributing workflows around the world.

"Thanks to the smart implementation of webhooks, plus the combination of automation, integration and programming options, the workload involved in creating workflows drops by 90%. The obvious benefit is cost reduction, and/or more room for useful workflow traffic. This brings customers a big step closer to achieving the goal of effective supply chain management,” explains David Merzenich.

The helmut.cloud solution is offered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and includes comprehensive user management across organizations, teams and users, down to granular role management. 

For more information visit MoovIT and CHESA, partnering with Hiscale and ObviousFuture, at booth #SL3124 during the NAB Show or visit the company’s website www.movit.de. 

Book a Meeting with MoovIT at NAB at https://calendly.com/moovit-general

LAS VEGAS—As part of the Adobe Summit, Adobe has announced a number of major product developments that will help companies optimize their entire content supply chain with generative AI. 

As part of that effort, Adobe unveiled a set of products to help companies automate and optimize their content supply chain. Those include Adobe GenStudio, a new generative AI-first offering that lets marketing teams quickly plan, create, manage, activate and measure on-brand content and Firefly Services, a collection of generation and editing APIs.

“The world’s leading brands and agencies are partnering with Adobe to accelerate their content supply chain as they deliver on a mandate to drive greater efficiency in their organizations,” said Eric Hall, chief marketing officer, Adobe Experience Cloud. “Adobe is uniquely positioned to combine best-in-class applications across Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud with generative AI natively integrated for teams to boost productivity and deliver personalization at scale.”

Adobe also announced new workflow and planning capabilities. It reported that a major release in Workfront will provide every user a unified view into all activities across the marketing lifecycle, through highly visual marketing campaign calendars and dynamic briefs. This new planning module connects records from every marketing campaign such as assets, timelines, project status and performance metrics to ensure organizations plan strategically and accelerate campaign delivery.

In terms of Workfront and Frame.io, Adobe said that a new natively integrated review and approval workflow will streamline collaboration between cross-functional teams. Any time a marketer creates a project in Workfront, a parallel project is automatically created in Frame.io (where creatives share content and track feedback). Any comments and assets shared will instantly be visible across both applications.

In terms of new creation and production capabilities, Adobe announced new Firefly features with Adobe Firefly Services and Custom Models that fundamentally change how brands create and produce content to deliver personalization at scale. 

Custom Models enable enterprises to further train and customize Firefly based on their own assets, from products to characters to campaign and brand styles. 

Firefly Services are a collection of generation and editing APIs that can be embedded into any workflow and power the creation of hundreds of localized or personalized asset variations.

During the event, Adobe also outlined new capabilities in Creative Cloud for Enterprise. 

With Object Composites, creative teams can seamlessly blend products and objects into a variety of high-quality generative scenes, inclusive of tones, colors, lighting and textures—all in seconds. And with Style Kits, teams can create and share style templates to save and reuse Firefly prompts, reference assets and presets.

In addition, Adobe Express for Enterprise empowers marketers to self-serve in creating and editing on-brand content with speed and ease. With brand style controls and templates, creative teams can set color, font usage and lock elements such as images to ensure non-creative teams stay on brand.

In terms of new asset management capabilities, Adobe explained that the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets content hub will allow teams to easily distribute brand-governed assets across their organization, partners, agencies and more. Users can collaborate and share images, icons, illustrations, PDFs, videos and more, with a unified content hub for all enterprise use cases. Content hub forms a seamless connection point between Adobe GenStudio and AEM Assets, where any user can search for an asset and create personalized variations with Firefly in Adobe Express, the all-in-one content creation application.

With AEM Sites variant generation, Adobe reported that brands can take a single marketing asset and create numerous variations of copy that speak to different audiences. Teams can take a web page for instance and generate variants where the copy is personalized for target personas across different industries, job roles, age groups and more. With Edge Delivery Services, brands can deliver the fastest possible page load times, increasing SEO rankings, engagement and conversion. Document-based authoring in AEM Sites also allows the broader team to author webpages in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

In terms of new reporting and insights capabilities, Adobe announced that with Adobe Content Analytics brands will be able to understand the performance of AI-generated content down to the attribute level. The system can analyze and pinpoint elements (colors, objects, styles) that resonate with target audiences. This provides a necessary feedback loop ensuring that AI-generated content also aligns with business goals.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—Cloud-based media supply chain solutions provider SDVI has  introduced Rally Access Workstation, a fully managed solution for editing in the cloud with Adobe Premiere Pro. 

This new addition to the company's Rally media supply chain management platform enables anywhere, anytime access to hosted edit workstations and content in the cloud, dynamically managing associated infrastructure deployment so that media organizations can scale their edit capacity easily and cost-effectively within an automated media supply chain.

"Manual edits are an essential part of media supply chains, and now they are moving to the cloud — like everything else in the supply chain — in a fully managed way," said Chris Brähler, vice president of product at SDVI. "Only with Rally Access Workstation can users automatically spin up a licensed Adobe workstation, fill the bin, make edits on the timeline, and hit submit, and the supply chain carries on. It's a fully managed engagement that integrates human tasks and automated jobs, supported by automatic infrastructure provisioning. By moving manual activity into the cloud, Rally Access Workstation represents the next step in fully migrating supply chains."

Available now to all Rally users, Rally Access Workstation makes it possible to run an instance of Adobe Premiere Pro on a cloud-based virtual workstation with all content (high-resolution and/or proxy) preloaded in the bin, as well as markers on the timeline corresponding to workorder items that need attention, as identified by automated processing upstream in the supply chain. Because content stays in the cloud, users avoid latencies and egress costs commonly associated with on-premises edit workstations, SDVI reported. 

By implementing Adobe Premiere Pro workstations in the cloud with Rally Access Workstation, Rally users reduce the burden of maintaining and scheduling physical edit suites. Rather than manage numerous costly machines on premises or in remote-work environments, Rally users can quickly connect authorized editors to high-end edit software and the content they need, on their preferred device, via a web browser and internet connection. With Rally Access Workstation, users can instantly scale up access to address peaks in demand or to free up space in on-premises edit bays for other, more creative work, and scale down just as quickly when those resources are no longer needed.

"Rally Access Workstation is a significant development for the platform — and for the industry — because it enables tight integration of Adobe Premiere Pro into the media supply chain without incurring data movement in or out of the cloud," added Brähler. "While Rally users could already utilize Premiere Pro locally in their supply chain, this new capability expands access to our industry-leading editing software and makes utilization as simple as starting a work order."

Further information about SDVI and the company's Rally media supply chain platform is available at www.sdvi.com. 

LOS ANGELES—At its Adobe MAX conference this week, Adobe unveiled “Project Stardust,” a new object-aware editing engine that uses generative AI to revolutionize image editing, along with its latest collection of early-stage innovations, highlighting exciting new uses of generative AI and 3D technologies across multiple creative domains, including photo, video, audio, 3D, design and fashion applications. 

The 11 inventions are featured in Adobe’s annual “Sneaks” showcase, where Adobe engineers and research scientists offer first looks or “sneak peeks” at prototype ideas and technologies, each showing future potential to become important elements of Adobe products that are trusted by millions of users across the world.

Project Stardust enables users to easily select, edit and even delete complex elements in any image, making image editing more intuitive, accessible and time efficient for any user. For example, Project Stardust lets users select persons in a photograph, move them to a different place in the composition and fill in the background where they were previously standing. Users can also change elements like the color of a person’s clothing or the position in which they’re standing—treating any flat images like a file with layers.

“Adobe Sneaks are a can’t-miss, fan-favorite moment at MAX every year, and for good reason – nothing is more inspiring than brilliant employees demonstrating cutting-edge technologies that might power future Adobe products,” said Gavin Miller, vice president and fellow of Adobe Research. “Our passion for creators is at the heart of each Sneak, and this year’s showcase highlights exciting new ways generative AI and 3D technologies can supercharge creative expression, reimagining what Adobe tools make possible.”

With Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models, now commercially available, the range and scope of new applications continues to scale beyond image generation. This class of Sneaks offer powerful examples of how generative AI can reimagine video, audio, animation and motion graphics workflows, supercharging discovery and ideation processes and cutting post-production time from days to minutes.

Photo
Project Stardust is a powerful new object-aware editor that revolutionizes image editing and magically moves or removes objects simply by clicking on them. With Project Stardust, users can easily select, edit and delete complex elements in any image—enabling them to select persons in a photograph, move them to a different place in the composition and fill in the background where they were previously standing. Users can also change elements like the color of a person’s clothing and the position in which they’re standing—treating any image like a file with layers.

Project See Through is an AI-powered tool that makes it simple to remove reflections from photos. Glass reflections are an annoyance that everyone is familiar with in photos, obscuring the subject of the image, and often making it unusable. Though it’s difficult if not impossible to remove reflections using existing software, See Through dramatically simplifies the process.

Video & Audio
Project Fast Fill brings the power of Firefly generative AI to video for the first time. Leveraging Generative Fill technology—which Adobe Photoshop already uses to ease the addition, removal, or expansion of content in images with simple Firefly-powered text prompts—Project Fast Fill offers an early look at what human-prompted generative AI could enable inside Adobe video editing tools including Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Project Dub Dub Dub automates the video dubbing process, making a historically labor- and cost-intensive process as easy as clicking a button. Thanks to Project Dub Dub Dub’s AI capabilities, a recording or audio track of a video can be automatically translated to all supported languages while preserving the voice of the original speaker, temporally aligned with the original dialogue and ready to publish.

Project Scene Change makes it easy for video editors to composite a subject and scene, from two separate videos captured with different camera trajectories, into a scene with synchronized camera motion.

Project Res Up is a tool that easily converts video from low- to high-resolution using innovative diffusion-based upsampling technology.

3D & Design
Project Poseable represents a breakthrough in AI-based image generation models, according to Adobe, making it easy for the image generator to seamlessly interact with large 3D objects, including poses from photos of real people. The prototype is integrated with Project Poseable which can create a 3D rendering from text input, take depth and perspective into consideration, and re-align the object. While creating 3D scenes with traditional skeletal systems is technically complex and time-consuming, Project Poseable offers an effortless alternative that makes it possible for anyone to expand their creative horizons, the company said.

Project Neo enables creators to incorporate 3D shapes in their 2D designs—all without requiring technical expertise in 3D creation tools. Today, creators of 2D designs such as infographics, posters, or logos are often limited in their ability to incorporate 3D elements given the complexity of those workflows, which can require years of experience. Project Neo enables creators to embrace simplified 3D design within 2D tools and methods.

Project Primrose blurs the line between technology and fashion, demonstrating the potential for flexible textile displays—and turning clothes into creative canvases. This interactive dress can offer infinite style possibilities, displaying content created with Adobe Firefly, After Effects, Stock,and Illustrator.

Project Glyph Ease makes customized lettering more accessible by streamlining the tedious design process of glyphs—the specific design and shape elements of each letter character. Beginning with a hand-drawn letter shape, Project Glyph Ease uses AI to automatically generate an entire set of glyphs matching the input lettering style. Users can then easily edit the generated glyphs in Illustrator.

Project Draw & Delight offers a suite of generative AI tools that helps anyone along their creation journey, from transforming initial ideas—often represented as rough doodles or scribbles—into polished and refined sketches, then experimenting with color palettes, style variations and different backgrounds.

This year’s MAX Sneaks is co-hosted by actor, comedian and singer Adam Devine. Watch the full Sneaks session here and read more about each Sneak on the Adobe blog.

MovieLabs has announced the next 10 participating companies in its 2030 Vision Showcase Program.

The organizations selected to participate in this round are Adobe, Ateliere Creative Technologies, Avid, Gunpowder, Hammerspace, Light Iron, Pixel Logic, Sohonet, Universal Pictures and Yamdu.

Among the case studies submitted by the latest cohort are:

• Using camera to cloud for fast turnaround editorial content at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival from Adobe
• Virtualizing apps and data for distributed editorial collaboration by Avid
• Ateliere Creative Technologies’ work on moving Lionsgate’s de-centralized distribution assets to a singular cloud ‘single source of truth’ library to enable more flexible distribution strategies
• An end-to-end Cloud VFX “studio in a box” for Houses of Parliament from Gunpowder
• Light Iron’s full color-in-the-cloud pipeline used on episodic television
• Sohonet’s secure content management system for managing assets and workflow tasks
• How Universal Pictures supports feature production and post utilizing MovieLabs Ontology for Media Creation

Each of the organizations will work with MovieLabs to develop their case study which will be published at MovieLabs.com (date tba).

Richard Berger, CEO of MovieLabs, said: “Since we published the MovieLabs 2030 Vision, it has been broadly adopted by the industry as the roadmap for the future of media creation. The ten principles in the vision establish a framework for more secure and interoperable workflows, which ultimately gives time back to creatives so they can focus on what they do best—creating amazing stories and experiences.

“We are excited to work with the new showcase participants to publish these technical case studies and share with the industry examples of how the 10 Principles of the 2030 Vision are already delivering real and significant efficiencies, which is critical now in this time of industry change.”

CUPERTINO, Calif.—TVU Networks has joined the Adobe Video Solution Partner Program and released a new Premiere Pro plug-in that gives users access to TVU Search from within the editing application, the company said today.

Live and archived video sources are directly available for import into a Premiere Pro editing session with the new plug-in, which the company will demonstrate during NAB New York 2023, Oct. 24-26, at the Javits Center in Manhattan, TVU Networks said. 

Rather than requiring time-consuming manual searches, editors can use the plug-in to locate desired video content in seconds, easily clip it and transfer it immediately to Premiere Pro without leaving their creative canvas or application, it said.

TVU Search, a cloud-based tool, relies on AI-driven algorithms and automation to transform the process of searching for the right content. Able to ingest nearly any live video source, TVU Search analyzes and indexes video content in real-time upon ingest and enables users to pinpoint the specific content needed using an intuitive interface, it said.

The plug-in presents Premiere Pro users with an extensive array of tools, including speech-to-text transcripts, integrated player tools with shortcut keys, quick transcript export and easy mark-in/mark-out timecode configurations, to create video clips. Multiple users in multiple locations can use TVU Search to access the same content at the same time, it said.

The ability of TVU Search to reduce content search time dramatically offers an advantage to news and sports producers of broadcast, OTT and social media content who require quick turnaround times to build audience and ultimately revenue, the company said. 

Having already transformed many live ingest newsroom workflows, TVU Search as a plug-in for Premiere Pro offers users of the Adobe editing solution the same ability to search for the very latest live content to drop into their editing timeline, it said.

“Adobe Premiere Pro is recognized as the industry standard with it comes to video editing,” said TVU Networks CEO Paul Shen. “Users of the program will now be able to find exactly the content they need for their video projects and bring it directly to their production without ever having to leave the Adobe Premiere Pro interface.

“In addition to saving time and effort, TVU Search will expand content discovery for users allowing them to crate more compelling video projects faster and easier using AI and automation technology.”

See TVU Search at NAB NY booth 542.

More information is available on the company’s website.

It is with profound sadness that Adobe shared the passing of the company’s beloved co-founder, Dr. John Warnock, 82. Dr. Warnock passed away on Saturday surrounded by his family.

Dr. Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Dr. Charles Geschke after meeting as colleagues at Xerox. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, groundbreaking technology that helped to spark the desktop publishing revolution. Dr. Warnock retired as CEO in 2000 and was chairman of the board, a position he shared with Dr. Geschke, until 2017. Since then, he was a member of the Board of Directors. 

In recognition of his technical achievements, Dr. Warnock was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama; the Computer Entrepreneur Award from the IEEE Computer Society; the American Electronics Association Medal of Achievement; and the Marconi Prize for contributions to information science and communications.

Dr. Warnock is survived by his wife, Marva Warnock, and his three children.

You can read the email from Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen, which was sent to employees announcing Warnock's passing here. 

LOS ANGELES—The HPA Awards Committee has announced that a trio of recipients will receive the 2023 HPA Award for Engineering Excellence at this year’s HPA Awards gala on November 9 at the Hollywood Legion in Hollywood. 

“In the midst of a revolutionary time in media and entertainment, it was exciting to see the caliber and number of entries to the Engineering Excellence awards this year,” said HPA Awards Engineering Committee chair Joachim Zell. “Our esteemed judges remarked on the true innovation and advancement in our industry depicted in the presentations. Sincere congratulations to the winners, and we acknowledge the remarkable achievements represented by every submission.” 

The HPA Awards for Engineering Excellence are a coveted and competitive honor, denoting outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution, and archive, HPA said. A distinguished panel of industry judges review materials and video presentations before gathering to hear presentations from submitters and then vote on the top technologies.

The winners of the 2023 HPA Award for Engineering Excellence are:

• Adobe for Adobe Premiere Pro Text-Based Editing. Premiere Pro is the only professional editing software to incorporate text-based editing, revolutionizing the way filmmakers approach their craft by making dialogue editing as simple as cutting and pasting text. Powered by Adobe Sensei, Text-Based Editing analyzes video clips and provides transcriptions that identify individual speakers. Using an in-app text editor, post-production teams can search for words or phrases, cut sentences, and rearrange dialogue to automatically shape rough cuts directly in their timeline. The feature is designed to help post-production professionals create a rough cut faster, increasing efficiency and eliminating traditional bottlenecks in locating, trimming, and moving specific clips.
• Flanders Scientific for XMP550. The XMP550 is a 55" UHD resolution HDR and SDR reference mastering monitor built around a groundbreaking new QD-OLED panel featuring 2,000 nits peak luminance, 4,000,000:1 contrast, and FSI's widest color gamut to date. The XMP550 qualifies as a Dolby Vision mastering monitor, bringing an end to the days of compromising between smaller reference-grade HDR displays and larger non-reference client displays. The XMP550 delivers the best of both worlds with truly reference-grade performance and professional connectivity in a form factor large enough for both the colorist and clients to view. The XMP550 is OLED without compromise.
• Kino Flo for Mimik 120. The MIMIK 120 is a full spectrum image-based lighting fixture that can synchronize to a XR volume to provide foreground lighting. It can be assembled as a wall or ceiling or be used as individual fixtures. It’s a 7200 pixel, 10 pitch lighting tile that converts a 3 color RGB video pixel into a 5 color pixel consisting of RGB, 2700K & 6500K phosphor white LEDs. The 5-color pixel ensures better tonal and color reproduction of foreground elements. It also operates at a high frequency enabling camera speeds of up to 960 fps.

HPA also bestowed an "Honorable Mention" on StypeLandXR. 

HPA said that StypeLandXR is an innovative Unreal Engine 5 plugin, revolutionizing virtual production. This trailblazing tool, used for the award-winning FOX Sports Live MULTICAM XR Set, which won the Sports Emmy - The George Wensel Technical Achievement Award, uniquely corrects color shifts on LED walls and resolves inherent delays between LED walls and set extensions. It enables the creation of extensive virtual spaces, offering accurate color matching, seamless transitions, and precision calibration. By enhancing visual impact and immersion, StypeLandXR opens new frontiers of creative potential.

The Engineering Excellence Award will be presented at the HPA Awards gala on November 9, 2023. Nominations honoring creative artistry in 19 categories will be announced in early autumn.

The HPA Awards are made possible through the generous sponsorship of diamond title sponsor Blackmagic Design and supporting sponsor Colorist Society. More information about the HPA Awards and the Hollywood Professional Association can be found at www.hpaonline.com.

NEW YORK—Proximic by Comscore has announced new and expanded integrations with Adobe, Publica and Teads that have boosted the reach of its Predictive Audience segments to the point where they are now being used by more than 5,000 advertiser clients.

"We’re already seeing such strong adoption of Predictive Audiences because the product is delivering," said Rachel Gantz, managing director of Proximic by Comscore. “Proximic by Comscore’s Predictive Audiences are outperforming legacy data sets and giving brands the incrementality they need for growth. These new partnerships allow us to continue expanding reach for advertisers no matter which programmatic platform they choose to use.” 

The new and expanded partnerships provide access to Proximic by Comscore’s ID-free segments including Predictive Audiences, Proximic demographics and keyword targeting in even more places where digital media is bought and sold. 

“Having access to future-proofed, signal loss resilient targeting tactics like Proximic by Comscore’s Predictive Audiences is critical to build a sustainable strategy today that will continue to deliver business outcomes.” said Alex Reeder, vice president of data innovation and research, Havas Media, which is a client of the product. ”If we can achieve superior performance without the use of IDs, it’s a win-win.”

For media buyers looking to leverage Proximic by Comscore’s segments, the integration with Teads introduces ID-less CTV targeting capabilities. By utilizing Proximic's Predictive Audiences and ID-free demographic segments, media buyers can efficiently target their ideal consumers on CTV platforms, ensuring relevant and effective ads are delivered to the biggest screen in a consumer’s home.

Recognizing the importance of supporting media sellers, Proximic by Comscore has also established a new partnership with CTV ad server Publica. This collaboration enables Proximic by Comscore’s Predictive Audience data to be seamlessly integrated into Publica's CTV ad server, streamlining the process for publishers looking to access ID-free audience data at scale to enhance monetization of their inventory, the companies said. 

Additionally, Proximic by Comscore has extended its integrations with leading demand side platform Adobe Advertising. These integrations enable media buyers to access Proximic by Comscore’s Predictive Audiences directly via Adobe’s suite of targeting solutions. 

LOS ANGELES—The Adobe Foundation, USC Annenberg and Dr. Stacy Smith have unveiled a new website, The Inclusion List, that ranks the 100 most inclusive theatrically-released films from 2019 to 2022. It also highlights the top distributors associated with the movies on the list, names eight individuals as the top producers and showcases two top directors for inclusion during the 2019-2022 period studied. 

Adobe commissioned the study from USC Annenberg and Dr. Stacy Smith as part of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative in collaboration with the Adobe Foundation.

Top honors go to distributors Universal Pictures and A24; producers Will Packer, James Lopez, and Kevin Feige; films “The Woman King” and “The Farewell”; and directors Gina Prince-Bythewood and Lulu Wang, according to The Inclusion List.  

The other films in the top 5 were “Zola”, “Harriet”, and “Laal Singh Chaddha”

The effort is part of a larger effort to foster inclusion in the creative industries by Adobe. In a blog post Stacy Martinet, vice president of marketing at Adobe and an Adobe Foundation Board member noted that “The more facts we know, the more we can spotlight, learn and create change. That is a driving motivation behind the first-of-its-kind The Inclusion List.”

The data-driven study “is what’s needed to analyze and pinpoint the bright spots, and where a greater focus on inclusivity is needed,” she explained, adding that “We’re releasing our study in parallel to the Festival de Cannes, the iconic celebration of films and filmmakers driving the art form forward. We hope that our findings can fuel conversations and plans of action that seek to ensure the film industry is as inclusive as the world it reflects.”

To bring together the list, 376 theatrically-released films were scored across 20 inclusion indicators, with the highest-scoring films receiving top honors, she reported. The indicators ranked gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ+, disability, and age representation for cast in leading and all speaking roles. Key findings include: 

• The 100 most inclusive films made between 2019-2022 include Oscar winners and crowd pleasers, proving that inclusive storytelling resonates in major ways, including "Everything Everywhere All at Once", "Devotion", "Emily the Criminal", "Birds of Prey", and "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever".
• Seven of the top 10 films on the Inclusion List were directed by women of color, including Gina Prince-Bythewood and Lulu Wang.
• Among large distributors, Universal Pictures took top honors with 22 films on the list, followed by Sony Pictures Entertainment (14 films) and Warner Bros. Pictures (11 films). For independent distributors, A24 led its peers with 9 movies, with Neon in second place (6 films). The top distributors reflect the companies responsible for bringing the films on The Inclusion List to audiences.  
• A total of eight producers received a nod for their work in film over the past four years. Will Packer, James Lopez, Kevin Feige, Dede Garner, Jeremy Kleiner, Jordan Peele, Ian Cooper and Jason Blum were named the most inclusive producers for landing 3 or more films on The Inclusion List. 

BERGEN, Norway—Vizrt has integrated its product suite more tightly with Adobe Premiere Pro to make searching for assists faster and to simplify the production process, the company said today.

While Vizrt integrates with Adobe across multiple workflows in Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop, one particularly strong integration with Premiere Pro is enhanced capabilities with Viz One, Vizrt’s media asset management (MAM) solution, it said.

This integration allows Edit Decision Lists (EDLs) made in Viz One to be dragged and dropped into Premiere Pro via Vizrt’s Adobe Assistant panel to create a new sequence. Similarly, the company’s browser-based Viz Story can import its timelines into Premiere Pro, including video and graphics when craft editing is needed, it said.

Vizrt has also accelerated asset searches in Viz One from Adobe Premiere Pro, making them up to three-times faster. Greater detail is also provided to users when they work from the Assistant panel. Users can identify and work with both archive content and incoming media shortly after the Viz One import begins, it said.

Recent updates to Viz One Studio also bring new editing capabilities to the web browser. They replace the need to use Viz One’s legacy PreCut and EasyCut applications, helping streamline users’ editing experience and improving the workflow between Viz One, Viz Story and Premiere Pro, it said.

“The added functionality of the Viz One integration into Adobe Premiere Pro enhances the user experience, supports faster workflows and enhances performance. Editors and creators—whether in news, sports or other productions positions—will find it easier to edit, design and collaborate across teams,” said James Scott, engineering and platform manager at Vizrt Group, MAM Business Unit.

“For example, a journalist could rough cut in Viz One Studio, create an edit decision list [and] then share that with an editor who can drag and drop straight into their timeline,” he said.

Users also can leverage Vizrt and Adobe across the production process, facilitating easier workflows for designers, journalists and editors. Designers using Vizrt’s Viz Artist real-time 3D design application have greater flexibility as a result of its integration with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, it said.

Viz Artist includes a multi-layer composition import tool for working with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects compositions. Control text and control image plug-ins also are automatically assigned, providing a faster transition from Adobe After Effects composition to a template ready for on-air use in Viz Artist, the company said.

Vizrt’s Meta-Graphics workflow enables graphics and video to be edited continually using the Viz Pilot Edge HTML-based template editor up until the moment when the content goes on-air. This unique, non-burned-in graphics workflow integrates with Adobe Premiere Pro, allowing a journalist to define the graphics needed for a story in the newsroom system and stay updated as the news changes, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

LAS VEGAS—In the runup to the 2023 NAB Show, Adobe has announced a host of new improvements to its production software offerings, including the launch of AI-powered text-based editing, the expansion of its Frame.io Collaboration Platform to photos and PDFs, the addition of context-sensitive Properties Panel and community-requested improvements to After-Effects and user-requested improvements to the speed and stability of its software. 

“Today’s creatives are racing to meet demand for standout video content across platforms and surfaces that is growing exponentially,” said Ashley Still, senior vice president, creative product group and digital media growth at Adobe. “We are excited to help them meet these challenges with the latest cutting-edge Premiere Pro and After Effects innovations, empowering creative professionals to focus on the craft of creating, while cutting out time- consuming tasks that prolong content ideation, creation and delivery.”

A few highlights of the improvements and Adobe announcements include:  

• Adobe Premiere Pro debuts Adobe Sensei powered Text-Based Editing, making editing video as easy as copying and pasting text, and Automatic Tone Mapping to achieve consistent colors and contrast when mixing footage from different cameras, Adobe reported. 
• Premiere Pro adds dozens of user-requested features while delivering enhanced performance and stability making it the fastest, most reliable version ever released.
• After Effects celebrates 30th anniversary, adding a context sensitive Properties Panel to give users quick access to the most important animation settings.
• Frame.io empowers teams to seamlessly collaborate on reviews of photos and PDFs in a centralized cloud-based workspace.
• Camera to Cloud capabilities now natively integrated in FUJIFILM X-H2 and X-H2S cameras create new end-to-end content capture, editing, review and approval workflows, to enable instant photo capture and cloud collaboration.
• Adobe previews Forensic Watermarking, strengthening cloud security for enterprises by deepening digital protection of sensitive pre-release content.
• Nearly 3 million users, including creatives at the world’s largest brands, agencies and studios now trust Frame.io for seamless collaborative review and approvals.

Specific updates to Premiere Pro include: 

• Text-Based Editing represents a groundbreaking shift in post-production workflows, Adobe said. Premiere Pro is the only professional editing software to incorporate Text-Based Editing, revolutionizing the way creators approach their craft by making video editing as simple as copying and pasting text. Powered by Adobe Sensei, Text-Based-Editing automatically analyzes and transcribes clips so editors, producers, and assistants can simply copy and paste sentences into any order they want and instantly see them appear on the timeline. Transcripts can be searched in the transcript window to identify exact words and phrases.
• Automatic Tone Mapping and log color detection lets editors mixes and match HDR footage from different sources into the same SDR project and get great looking, consistent color. This means editors don’t need to use look-up tables (LUTs) or manually balance footage to get great looking images.
• Addressing dozens of top user requests, Premiere Pro features significant under-the-hood improvements, and is the fastest and most reliable version ever shipped. In addition to enhanced performance and stability, new features include background auto save, system reset options, and an Effects Manager for plug-ins and even more GPU acceleration.
• Collaborative editing enhancements include Sequence Locking, enabling the active editors to lock a sequence so it becomes view-only for other editors, Presence Indicators to provide visibility on who is working in shared projects, and Work While Offline to allow editors to continue to work offline, then publish changes without overwriting others’ work when they return online. Included with Creative Cloud, Frame.io support enables secure sharing, collaborative review and project management for Premiere Pro edits, including direct export, upload and Share for Review capabilities.
• Premiere Pro also adds improved format support for RED V-Raptor X, ARRI Alexa 35, and Sony Venice v2 cameras; expanded Speech to Text support for Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish; GPU acceleration for debayering and transition effects; simpler track targeting; and the ability to export and render directly to Adobe Media Encoder, Adobe said. 

Specific updates to After Effects include: 

• The new Properties Panel offers quick and easy access to the most important animation settings in one convenient panel, Adobe said. The Properties Panel is context-sensitive, automatically showing users the most important controls needed based on selections, cutting down on the time needed to navigate through the timeline and reducing the learning curve for new users.
• New ACES and OpenColorIO maintains consistent colors when sharing assets with other post-production apps to help users create more predictable and photo-realistic images in less time and effort.
• New community-requested features deliver performance optimizations including faster timeline layer selection and multi-frame rendering of shapes – plus new keyboard shortcuts for Selectable Track Mattes. After Effects now helps users fix common issues without the need for IT expert assistance, including in-app troubleshooting for potential workflow issues, system performance optimizations, simple interfaces for enabling and disabling plug-ins and diagnostics to fix bottlenecks in caches and preferences, Adobe said. 

Adobe’s latest releases of Premiere Pro and After Effects, including beta versions of Premiere Pro’s Text-Based Editing and Automatic Tone Mapping, and After Effects’ Properties Panel, will be on display at the 2023 NAB Show from April 15-19 in Las Vegas at booth #N2438, and generally available in May 2023.  

Adobe’s latest release of Frame.io will also be on display at the 2023 NAB Show. Fujifilm’s native Frame.io Camera to Cloud integrations for X-H2 and X-H2S cameras are available April 13. 

SEATTLE—Tagboard will release new features for its cloud production studio supporting a highly efficient workflow at the 2023 NAB Show, April 15-19, in Las Vegas.

The features include:

• Integration with Adobe Photoshop, featuring a drag-and-drop workflow that eliminates duplicative work to bring graphic designs to screens.
• Automated production workflows with APIs, allowing producers to create dynamic content from any data source.
• Real-time production analytics powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing audience engagement data across media properties.

With the release, Tagboard has set its sights on enabling greater workflow efficiency, the company said.

"In an industry that works in milliseconds, there's absolutely zero excuse for the inefficiencies of traditional workflows and outdated processes," said Tagboard CEO Nathan J Peterson. "Not only are we turning today's broadcast and in-venue screens into two-way communication devices that keep audiences engaged with partners across channels, but with these new releases, we're drastically reducing the operating overhead for production teams to do so. The phrase 'That'll take too much time' should never be spoken again."

Tagboard’s integration with Adobe allows producers to eliminate the duplicate work involved in bringing a graphic design to a screen. Tagboard's graphics studio automatically imports fully layered files from Adobe Photoshop, creating a seamless process and eliminating the need to rebuild graphics, the company said.

The company’s new API engine enables automatic import and display of dynamic content from any source, populating graphic templates with complex data in a few simple clicks, it said.

The release also supports real-time engagement data for broadcasters, leveling the field with digital competitors. By better understanding viewer behavior and exactly when, where and how fans are interacting with content, producers can improve editorial decision-making and monetization, the company said.

In launching the release of these new capabilities, the company worked with AWS’s latest serverless architecture to process real-time data and provide a fast, safe and reliable graphic interface, while supporting the demand of millions of scans per second from fans of more than 500 Tagboard media and sports partners, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe has announced that 10 Oscar-nominated films used Adobe creative applications to bring their stories to life –  including three Oscar-nominated documentaries, and box-office hits ranging from `Everything Everywhere All at Once’ to `Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ and `Top Gun: Maverick’. 

Adobe Creative Cloud applications used by the filmmakers included Premiere Pro, Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, and Frame.io to edit, create, and collaborate from anywhere – along with Adobe Substance 3D to produce photo- and hyper-realistic 3D objects and effects, the company reported. 

“We’re proud to empower Oscar-nominated filmmakers to bring the world’s greatest stories to life with the leading platform of creative applications and services in Adobe Creative Cloud and the Substance 3D collection,” said Ashley Still, senior vice president, Adobe Creative Cloud. “Adobe continues pushing the boundaries of innovation to unlock the future of filmmaking, empowering our customers to create in new mediums and collaborate in new ways, from anywhere.”  

The creators using Adobe solutions include: 

• Editor Paul Rogers and his team at Parallax Post relied on Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io to bring `Everything Everywhere All at Once' to life, earning 11 nominations including Best Film Editing and Best Picture. “Premiere Pro is wonderful and I couldn’t imagine cutting in any other program,” said Rogers. “Combined with Frame.io, the whole workflow was very intuitive. I was able to focus on the film, not the tools.” 
• `Top Gun: Maverick' Film UI designer Jayse Hansen turned to After Effects and Illustrator to supplement the practical interior shots of the various aircrafts by designing and animating the realistic cockpit, speed and command center displays that captivated audiences and earned six nominations, including Best Visual Effects and Best Picture. “All of Adobe’s tools play so well together,” said Hansen. “This allows our team the quickest workflow from design, to animation, back to changes, and then to final composites.”
• Adobe Creative Cloud and Frame.io were important tools for the post-production team of `Fire of Love', the National Geographic Documentary Films feature which earned a Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at Sundance as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature Film. VFX artist Kara Blake shared that “In bringing this moving story to life, Photoshop and After Effects helped us craft the visual design of the film and integrate archival footage from multiple eras while Frame.io made remote collaboration easy and efficient.” 
• Digital Domain Texture Lead Artist Sarah Cosmi and her team used Substance 3D tools to polish the visuals in `Black Panther: Wakanda Forever', which earned five nominations including Best Visual Effects and Best Costume Design. “To create the climactic battle of `Black Panther: Wakanda Forever', Digital Domain built two complete digidouble armies, multiple super-powered combatants, and digital environments from scratch, and it all begins with the textures,” said Cosmi. “My team and I relied on Adobe Substance 3D as part of our integrated workflow to create every detail from the battleship to the oceans and more, which helped us deliver an amazing experience for audiences around the world.” 

Adobe also reported that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® honored Adobe with a Scientific Technical Award for Substance 3D Designer’s contributions in visual effects and animation. 

This is Adobe’s third Scientific and Engineering Award, including After Effects and Photoshop’s 2018 recognition for their impacts on motion design and digital painting. 

In addition, Adobe noted that at the 2023 Eddie Awards, film editors who trusted Premiere Pro bring their stories to life were honored for editing, including Best Edited Feature Film `Everything Everywhere All at Once’, Best Edited Single Camera Series `The Bear’, Best Edited Non-Script Series `VICE’, and Best Edited Animated Series `Love Death and Robots’. 

Adobe also received the Lumiere Century Award from the Advanced Imaging Society for creating innovative post-production tools and pioneering access to creative technology solutions in the filmmaking industry.

The company also announced that the Adobe Foundation recently made a  $250,000 grant to the USC School of Dramatic Arts’ (SDA) MFA Acting Program, directly supporting the production of short films by underrepresented students. This investment builds on Adobe’s commitment to enable inclusivity, access, opportunity, and creativity for all and the Adobe Foundation’s support of ‘The Inclusion List’ — a new research-led effort with the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which measures inclusion in the industry from 1929 to present day, charting nominations for women and people of color across 19 categories.

 Adobe and Frame.io, which is owned by Adobe, have announced that they have joined TPN+. 

TPN+ was launched this week as part of enhancements to the Motion Picture Association’s Trusted Partner Network content security initiative. 

TPN is a global, industry-wide content protection initiative overseen by the MPA to provide a set of requirements and best practices to prevent leaks, breaches, and hacks of pre-released, high-value media content. By creating a single, global directory of “trusted partner” vendors, content companies have access to a centralized database with their TPN status, TPN said. 

To further improve security, TPN announced recently that it was expanding its security assessments from site security to include SaaS-based cloud providers and their apps and launching TPN+.

The newly launched TPN+ platform and the new Cloud Security Assessment are designed to help the industry benefit from the rapidly advancing requirements of enhanced security awareness, preparedness, and capability as more and more productions rely on the cloud, TPN reported. 

Eight of the biggest content owners are members of TPN, including Universal, Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Netflix, Amazon Studios, and Apple.

In a blog post, Jason Druss, product marketing manager at Frame.io noted that “Frame.io has always made security the cornerstone of its platform since day one. That’s why today we’re excited to announce that along with Adobe video cloud services, we are proud early adopters of the TPN+ platform.”

“Although TPN compliance has always been voluntary, Frame.io has always treated it as a requirement and has been compliant since TPN’s inception in 2018. Now, we’re redoubling our efforts with Adobe to provide even greater support for our customers—and to allow both our existing and new customers to discover faster, more efficient, and more secure workflows,” he continued. 

“That Adobe and Frame.io are among those invited to join as members and early adopters of the TPN+ platform speaks to the fact that these studios depend on our products to create their content—and that we pledge to provide them with the utmost in security,” he concluded. 

SAN JOSE—Adobe today touted the leading role its video editing and collaboration tools have had for the fifth consecutive year among Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers.

An annual survey from the Sundance Institute has found 67% of Sundance films this year relied upon Adobe Premiere Pro or Frame.io. Premiere Pro was used to edit more than half of the festival’s films, including “Plan C,” “Going Varsity in Mariachi,” “Sometimes I Think About Dying” and “Fremont,” the company said.

Adobe Creative Cloud tools including After Effects, Photoshop and the Substance 3D Collection were used in making three-quarters of the 2023 films, it said. 

Since the pandemic, hybrid filmmaking has become the norm, elevating the importance of remote collaboration. The addition of Frame.io to Creative Cloud enables filmmakers to leverage cloud technologies to shoot, cut and review footage alongside anyone, anywhere in the world, it said.

The Sundance Institute is using Adobe’s video cloud workflow, including Camera to Cloud, Premiere Pro and After Effects, to create the Festival Daily Recap and videos for its social media channels, it said.

Adobe also announced its camera-to-cloud solution powered by Frame.io is being used around the world by more than 6,000 productions, which is changing how video is being created. It also announced a beta version of its Project Blink AI-powered web video editing with the ability to recognize objects, people, sounds and the spoken word is available.

More information is available on the company’s website.

The Project Blink beta also is available online.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire Figma, a major web-first collaborative design platform, for approximately $20 billion in cash and stock.

The deal is part of Adobe’s ongoing push to expand its tools for creative collaboration and builds on previous acquisitions of the work management platform Workfront in 2020 and the 2021 deal for Frame.io, a cloud-based video collaboration platform. 

“Adobe’s greatness has been rooted in our ability to create new categories and deliver cutting-edge technologies through organic innovation and inorganic acquisitions,” said Shantanu Narayen, chairman and CEO, Adobe. “The combination of Adobe and Figma is transformational and will accelerate our vision for collaborative creativity.”

Founded by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace in 2012, Figma pioneered product design on the web. Today, it offers tools for users designing interactive mobile and web applications to collaborate through multi-player workflows, sophisticated design systems and a rich, extensible developer ecosystem, the companies said.

In announcing the deal, Adobe said that Adobe’s and Figma’s expansive product portfolio will give the combined company will have a rare opportunity to power the future of work at a time when more people are working remotely or in hybrid work work conditions.   

It also stressed that Figma’s web-based, multi-player capabilities will accelerate the delivery of Adobe’s Creative Cloud technologies on the web, making the creative process more productive and accessible to more people.

In addition, the combined operations will benefit users in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers, by bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technology into the Figma platform, the companies said. 

“Figma has built a phenomenal product design platform on the web,” said David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media business. “We look forward to partnering with their incredible team and vibrant community to accelerate our joint mission to reimagine the future of creativity and productivity.”

"With Adobe's amazing innovation and expertise, especially in 3D, video, vector, imaging and fonts, we can further reimagine end-to-end product design in the browser, while building new tools and spaces to empower customers to design products faster and more easily,” added Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO, Figma.

FRIEDRICHSDORF, Germany—Maxon has announced that the latest release of Adobe After Effects includes an updated version of Cinema 4D Lite. Based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D Release S24, the software is available immediately for download to Adobe Creative Cloud members.

This latest update symbolizes the ongoing collaboration between Maxon and Adobe to deliver improved integration and performance between Maxon’s powerful 3D application, Cinema 4D, and Adobe After Effects, motion graphics and visual effects software. 

Along with compatibility and workflow enhancements, this latest version includes the Asset Browser that features ready-to-use and animate 3D models, materials and other assets, Maxon said.  

A library of assets has been specifically curated and made available to Cinema 4D Lite users. Assets are organized with rich metadata and keywords and are downloaded and cached locally on demand.

Artists can use Cinema 4D Lite to create and import 3D content into their After Effects projects. Cinema 4D content can be added to After Effects projects just like footage, and artists can extract scene data, like cameras, 3D objects, object masks, etc., that can be manipulated inside of After Effects, the companies said.

Cinema 4D Lite can be launched within After Effects and independently as a standalone application. 

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum Corporation has rolled out the Quantum® Collaborative Workflow Solution powered by CatDVTM. 

The turnkey solution was designed specifically for Adobe Premiere Pro users and to help large creative teams address the challenges of remote workflow editing and collaboration. 

Quantum said the launch occurred after extensive testing to ensure that Adobe Premiere Pro customers receive a completely integrated, Quantum-tested and supported solution.

“Quantum is proud to incorporate a high level of integration with Adobe tools so that creative teams can stay productive in their workflow, yet still have a seamless, powerful interface to all of the capabilities of Quantum CatDV,” said Dave Clack, general manager, Cloud Software and Analytics, Quantum. “This new solution incorporates the latest workflow best practices for a ready-to-use StorNext and CatDV environment that makes it easier for Adobe Creative Cloud users to love,” 

"Collaborative teams who rely on Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Photoshop, need a platform that gives them the performance and flexibility to realize their vision," said Sue Skidmore, head of partner relations for Adobe Video. “Our users value the tight integration and flexibility of environments provided by Quantum CatDV and StorNext.” 

The offering includes:

• A complete, high-performance StorNext 7 collaborative shared environment tuned for both on-site and remote team members for maximum productivity.
• Installation and integration of the CatDV Panel for Adobe Creative Cloud, including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop, giving creative users access to their entire content and project asset library directly within the Adobe workflow tool of choice.
• Installation and tuning of a complete installation of CatDV Server and Worker Nodes powering automation workflows for file ingest, proxy creation, and content push and pull from shared storage to archive.
• CatDV archive plugin installation and configuration, and customer’s option of library archive storage of up to 240 TB of Quantum Scalar Tape, ActiveScale, or Cloud.
• Optional remote workstation integration for Teradici or similar services.
• All support and training included for a turnkey, ready-to-work solution.

 More information about the solution can be found here.  

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe has completed Frame.io, a cloud-based video collaboration platform. The combination of Adobe’s video editing offerings—including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects—with Frame.io’s cloud-based review and approval functionality will radically improve the creative process and help Adobe offer an end-to-end video platform, the company said. 

With over a million users, Frame.io streamlines the video production process by enabling editors and others to seamlessly collaborate using cloud-first workflows, That creates an opportunity for Adobe, in conjunction with its partner ecosystem, to expand beyond video editors to a broader set of customers, teams and enterprises, Adobe said. 

“With the growing importance of video, we’re proud to add Frame.io’s industry-leading, cloud-native workflow capabilities to Creative Cloud,” said Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president, Creative Cloud. “We are committed to enabling collaboration beyond Adobe’s applications to the growing number of third-party applications across the creative ecosystem, many of which Frame.io supports.”

With the close of the transaction, Frame.io co-founder and CEO Emery Wells will continue to lead the Frame.io team, reporting to Scott Belsky as part of the Creative Cloud organization.

Adobe also highlighted several key ways that acquisition will help it make creative process more collaborative, productive and efficient: 

• The acquisition of Frame.io brings Adobe Creative Cloud’s collaboration services to video and will make it easy for teams to collaborate across Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and other Adobe Creative Cloud applications.
• All Creative Cloud customers will benefit from seamless collaboration on video projects with Frame.io workflow functionality built natively in Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop.
• With the addition of Frame.io, Adobe will continue to collaborate across all stakeholders of creativity beyond Adobe’s applications that includes third-party applications in the entire creative ecosystem.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas—Vizrt Group brand NDI today announce its upgraded support for Adobe Creative Cloud with the launch of NDI 5 earlier in the year.

Network Device Interface (NDI) expanded its support for Adobe Creative Cloud with integrated extension panels for Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, streamlining production by removing the need for producers and creatives to export designs for teams and clients to review.

“Designers, producers and directors globally utilize Adobe Creative Cloud to create new content and new experiences. With new tools from NDI 5 - NDI Bridge and NDI Remote - creators enjoy a streamlined workflow to advance creativity and output,” said Robert Musso, senior product manager at NDI. “With NDI, using a simple internet connection multiple editors can edit, highlight and localize content in record time; clients can virtually oversee the edits; multiple editors can create different outputs from the same live source – the possibilities on offer are revolutionary.”

NDI 5 for Adobe Creative Cloud makes it possible for multiple editors to create different output of the same live sources at the same time from anywhere in the world. It also allow creative collaboration and widens access to creative talent, as well as enabling integration among disparate toolsets to make workflows cohesive and unlock value and enhances talent acquisition and retention, NDI said.

“Adobe is always looking for innovative ways to improve creatives workflows,” said Sue Skidmore, head of partner relations for Adobe Video. “The NDI 5 Plug-In for Adobe Creative Cloud opens up new possibilities for how creators work and collaborate – no matter where their teams are located.”

Adobe Creative Cloud is compatible with the latest NDI 5.

More information is available on the NDI website.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Frame.io, a cloud-based video collaboration platform with over a million users at media and entertainment companies, agencies, and global brands, 

Adobe values the deal at about $1.275B and expects the deal to close during the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year. 

The acquisition comes at a time when producers are rapidly embracing cloud-based video production workflows and would allow Adobe to offer an improved end-to-end video collaboration platform. 

“We’ve entered a new era of connected creativity that is deeply collaborative, and we imagine a world where everyone can participate in the creative process,” said Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president, Creative Cloud. “With this acquisition, we’re welcoming an incredible customer-oriented team and adding Frame.io’s cloud-native workflow capabilities to make the creative process more collaborative, productive, and efficient to further unleash creativity for all.”

Adobe’s acquisition of Frame.io builds on recent innovations for creative collaboration including Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries, Cloud Documents, Design Systems in Adobe XD, Adobe Stock, and Adobe Fonts, Adobe explained. 

Those improvements, combined with Frame.io's technologies, will make it easy for teams to collaborate across Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and other Adobe Creative Cloud applications, Adobe said. 

“Frame.io and Adobe share a vision for the future of video creation and collaboration that brings together Adobe’s strength in video creation and production and Frame.io’s cloud-native platform,” said Emery Wells, Frame.io co-founder and CEO. “We’re excited to join Adobe to continue to drive video innovation for the world’s leading media and entertainment companies, agencies, and brands.”

When the deal closes, Frame.io co-founder and CEO Emery Wells and co-founder John Traver will join Adobe. Wells will continue to lead the Frame.io team, reporting to Scott Belsky. Until the transaction closes, each company will continue to operate independently.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe Premiere Pro was used by more filmmakers taking part in the 2021 Sundance Film Festival than any other video editing system, the company has announced.

According to an Adobe press release, 68% of films used the Premiere Pro video editing software on their films; this is the third year in a row that Premiere Pro was the most used editing tool among Sundance Film Festival entrants. In addition, Adobe says that 89% of the 2021 lineup is powered by Creative Cloud tools, including After Effects and Photoshop.

Adobe’s involvement with the 2021 Sundance Film Festival doesn’t stop there. On Feb. 1, Adobe is sponsoring Ignite Day, which is dedicated to supporting the next generation of creators. The day will feature the Ignite Panel, which will have filmmakers RaMell Ross, Kerry Warkia and Keisha Rae Witherspoon exploring storytelling traditions from historically marginalized communities and share how they are working to advance underrepresented narratives.

In addition, Adobe has announced that as part of its commitment to diversity and inclusion it will be replacing non-inclusive language and increasing the breadth of reference imagery in Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition.

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival is taking place primarily virtually from Jan. 28-Feb. 3.

BOSTON & MUNICH, Germany—Adobe is partnering with both Cinegy and Editshare on new technologies that support remote production and editing workflows, according to separate press releases from each company.

Cinegy’s collaboration with Adobe has resulted in the launch of Turbocut, an Adobe CC plug-in designed to accelerate the editing of H.264/HEVC by utilizing NVividia GPU’s hardware decoder. Turbocut also brings Cinegy’s Daniel2 video codec to Adobe CC, designed for making 8K resolutions or higher easier to edit, per Cinegy.

EditShare, meanwhile, has an integrated system with Adobe that connects editing workflows into a wider media ecosystem with deep metadata tracking and workflow automation either on-premise, in a hybrid configuration or as a cloud-based workflow.

There is also the new Flow panel from EditShare for Adobe Premiere Pro that is designed to transform content management, proxy and remote editing, and review and approval workflows for editors. Flow also offers an advanced proxy-based workflow with support for more than 500 codecs, which ties into Cinegy’s partnership with Adobe.

There is also the EFS open storage platform that is meant to enhance collaborative editing with full support for project-locking for Productions in Premiere Pro, allowing Premiere Pro to handle a large number of assets.

For more information, visit Cinegy and EditShare’s websites. 

BURBANK, CA—The awards committee of the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) this week announced the winners of the 2019 HPA Engineering Excellence Awards.

The winners include:

• Adobe–Content-Aware Fill for Video in Adobe After Effects;
• Epic Games—Unreal Engine 4;
• Pixelworks—TrueCut Motion; and
• Portrait Displays Inc. and LG Electronics—CalMAN LUT-based Auto-Calibration with LG OLED TVs.

“Every year, it is an absolute pleasure and a privilege to witness the innovative work that is brewing in our industry,” said HPA Awards Engineering Committee chair Joachim Zell. “Judging by the number of entries, which was our largest ever, there is genuine excitement within our community to push our capabilities to the next level.

“It was a close race and shows us that the future is being plotted by the brilliance that we see in the Engineering Excellence Awards. Congratulations to the winners, and all the entrants, for impressive and inspiring work.”

A blue-ribbon judging panel selected the winners after a session held at IMAX on June 22. Winners will be honored Nov. 21 at the 14th Annual HPA Awards Gala at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Honorable Mentions were awarded to:

• Ambidio for Ambidio Looking Glass;
• Grass Valley, a Belden brand for Creative Grading; and
• Netflix for Photon.

The HPA Awards were founded in 2005. They recognize creative artistry and innovation in the professional media industry. Tickets for the 14th Annual HPA Awards will be available later this summer, HPA said.

The Engineering Excellence Award honors outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive.

More information is available on the HPA website.

While the TV business already has seen an alarming number of consumers go over-the-top to get their TV programming, a new study says even more subscribers would cut the cord if the knew they could still get live programming, particularly sports.

According to a white paper from Telaria and Adobe, called "Inside the Minds of Cord-Cutters and Cable-Keepers," consumers lack awareness about the live streaming content that is available to them.

Among the consumers the report labels “cable keepers,” 20 percent don’t know how they would access live TV without a cable subscription.

“Despite steady declines in subscribers, cable still dominates viewership,” the report said. “The primary reason people keep the cord is the perception that only a linear connection can deliver live television content (42 percent). The second and third most common reasons are the desire to have a lot of channels (34 percent) and the fear of losing favorite networks (32 percent).”

Long term, sports and other live events may be reason enough to keep traditional pay TV. The report found that 30 percent of cable keepers said they would cut the cord if they knew they could live stream all of their favorite sports, events, and news.

[Read: Cord-Cutting Pace Accelerates As Viewers Seek Premium Programming, Says EMarketer]

The streaming world appears to be mystifying to cable keepers, with 55% saying that they are are confused by their cord-cutting options.

“Despite the barriers, almost half of cable subscribers have or are considering cutting the cord,” the report said. “This is especially true among Millennials, who outpace older segments in cord-free status. One in three cable subscribers would definitely cut the cord if they could live stream their favorite sports, events and news, and an additional 40% would consider it. Sports fans are even more likely to consider cutting the cord if they could live stream programming.”

The study found that the top reason for cord cutting were that cable was too expensive (73 percent), that everything was available via streaming (36 percent), that there were too many channels on cable (36 percent).

To the cost-conscious, two ways of accessing content have become more mainstream: password sharing and digital antennas.

The study found that 16 percent of respondents said they use someone else’s password from a network or provider to authenticate an app on a device. Another 21 percent share their passwords with friends and family.

More of the live streamers--70 percent said they were satisfied with the monthly price they paid for service, compared to 40 percent for cable-keepers.

LAS VEGAS--“Get Ready for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence” is a new half-day program that will be part of The Next-Generation Media Technologies Conference at this year’s NAB Show.

Taking place Tuesday, April 10 from 9 a.m. to noon, the program will present six panels examining the impact of machine and artificial intelligence on production, post, filmmaking, and digital content creation.

“We’re looking forward to hosting some of the industries’ leading creatives and technologists as they reveal how neural networks and other advancements are enabling production techniques previously thought impossible,” said Chris Brown, NAB executive vice president, Conventions and Business Operations.   

The six sessions—taking place in North Meeting Room N257 at the Las Vegas Convention Center—will explore whether machine intelligence can increase productivity, efficiencies and creativity in production planning, animation, visual effects, post-production and localization. Panelists will also delve into the capabilities of today’s neural network-based tools, and their potential to alter jobs, workflows and the nature of content itself.

[Read: NAB Show Previewing Future Of Content Production In New Session]

The program kicks off with “The Evolution of Content Production Aided by Machine Learning,” featuring Usman Shakeel, WW Technical Leader, Media and Entertainment at Amazon Web Services. Next, Jean Bolot, vice president of Research and Innovation for Technicolor will present “Optimizing Production With Neural Networks.” At 9:45, Norman Hollyn, editor/professor at The USC School of Cinematic Arts and Todd Burke, principal solutions engineer at Adobe Systems will explore “How Machine Intelligence Is Transforming Editorial.”

The second set of sessions begins at 10:40 with Rick Grandy, senior solutions architect for Nvidia, speaking about “New Frontiers in Animation and Computer Graphics,” followed with “From Dailies to Master: Machine Intelligence Comes to Video Workflows,” at 11 a.m., featuring Weyron Enriques, vice president of product development at Deluxe Technology, Barbara Ford Grant, senior vice president, Digital Production Services, HBO, and Adrian Graham, cloud solutions architect, M&E, at Google.

The program concludes at 11:40 a.m. with Jeff Kember, technical director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud discussing “The Future of Content With Machine Intelligence,” and the impact these new algorithms and this increased compute power could have on the entertainment industry.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Adobe is giving its Flash multimedia graphics animation software an overhaul and a new identity. The company announced this week that Flash will become Animate CC, a complete rewrite that incorporates the “native HTML5 Canvas and Web GL Support,” according to Adobe’s blog. Animate CC is slated to be released next month.

The move comes at a time when Flash is in decline, in part because it’s not supported on smartphones, according to The Verge. Flash players also download like a box of rocks, crash Firefox, and are everywhere, making for a hack portal so exploited Mozilla briefly blocked it last July, according to PC World.

Adobe itself acknowledged that more than one-third of content created with Flash uses HTML5 and reaches more than “1 billion devices.”HTML5 complies with Interactive Advertising Bureau standards, Adobe further notes, and is used by Nickelodeon and Los Angeles animation house, Titmouse, Inc.

Animate CC will become available for install, update and in the Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe said it would continue supporting Flash, and that previous versions would remain available. The Verge said the main focus of Adobe’s support would be on security.

Adobe’s blog has further information on the transition.

CNN announced recently that it has adopted Adobe Systems’ new collaborative workflow platform, Adobe Anywhere, as the central key to upgrading its entire international newsroom journalism editing and distribution approach. This could foretell a major paradigm shift in the way multicentric production and delivery systems will be shaped.

The Adobe Anywhere workflow Adobe revealed its Adobe Anywhere concept as a technology preview in 2012 and formally premiered it at the 2013 NAB Show. Now that CNN has come forward as a major adopter of the system, Adobe Anywhere has become a practical reality, and this column was the first publication they spoke to in detail about it.

REPLACING CREATIVE SUITE
“Adobe Anywhere is a collaboration platform that ties together Adobe’s creative applications with the customer’s own storage and asset management infrastructure,” said Michael Coleman, senior product manager for Adobe Anywhere at Adobe Systems. “It lets groups of editors and creative video folks work seamlessly together on the same application accessing the same media. Adobe Anywhere offers the benefits of shared media without actually moving ‘proxy’ files around because each participant is working with streaming versions from the original full resolution source material.”

Functioning as an enterprise-level system hosted in a private “cloud,” Adobe Anywhere works on-premise in a cluster of the customer’s own servers which enhances its security. It functions with Adobe’s two core components: the Adobe Anywhere Collaboration Hub containing all the project information and associated metadata; and the Adobe Mercury Streaming engine that enables dynamic real-time viewing of streams of source material complete with GPU-accelerated effects from Adobe Premiere Pro CC and sequences structured in Adobe Prelude CC.

You might take note of the “CC” behind each of those software components because Adobe Anywhere only functions with the new “Creative Cloud” versions of all of the company’s suite of digital tools, having included After Effects CC after the 2013 IBC Show. This replaces all the “Creative Suite” or “CS” editions of their digital creation classics including Adobe SpeedGrade, Audition, Media Encoder and Story. Creative Cloud software is no longer purchased as a standalone package, but is based on a renewable license model under which the user rents the latest version for the length of the subscription.

Currently, Adobe Anywhere cannot interface directly with non-Adobe production applications such as Final Cut Pro or Avid systems. But, as product manager Coleman said, “We’re open to that idea as soon as other companies want to work on it. It’s up to them.”

Adobe Anywhere came onto the market at the beginning of July 2013, and although specific numbers are not yet available, Coleman claims, “about 70 percent of our early adopting pilot customers have transitioned to purchase it.”

NETWORK INPUT
However, now CNN is not only glad to go public with their adoption of Adobe Anywhere version 1.6 in early August, but Michael Koetter, senior vice president of media technology and development at Turner Broadcasting, told me they were actually involved with its development by acting as a consultant on the project since 2011.

“Originally, our goal was to extend basic editing capabilities to the journalist’s desktop in production centers around the world from Moscow to London to L.A.,” Koetter said. “We worked with Adobe to enable their Premiere NLE to send the results of its Edit Decision Lists to our render farms in London, New York, Atlanta, and Washington D.C., all populated by Adobe Media Encoder software. That means that anything in our production system can go anywhere it is needed.”

In addition to providing journalists with low-res desktop clip sequencing capabilities, one of CNN’s top priorities is to begin migrating their approximately 700 higher end craft editing bays away from their worldwide standardizations on Apple’s Final Cut Pro 7 to using Adobe Premiere CC. Koetter was clear this will be a long-term process, and CNN is not turning off their FCP 7 integration right away. But Apple has announced they will not continue development of FCP 7 in the future.

Michael Koetter “Apple’s newer Final Cut X release did not have the capabilities we needed to execute a news-oriented workflow,” Koetter said, “so we went through a rigorous process with Adobe to vet Premiere for our needs and they responded with a very large number of modifications to their NLE, including features in their ‘editing finesse’ category and closed captioning tools. To us, Premiere appears to be the best-in-class craft editing system for our purposes.”

Of course, to optimize the new collaborative workflow of Adobe Anywhere they could not leave all that FCP 7 work behind.

“We have traditionally integrated with Final Cut Pro 7 using Final Cut XML interchange format for import/export,” Koetter said, “which for many people has become the new CMX EDL. But we found it is pretty low fidelity. The Final Cut XML we exchanged with Premiere in a journalist edit is just a little bit better than ‘mark-in/ mark-out’ for cuts only. We needed multilayer compositing, advanced effects such as motion blur, color correction and sophisticated titling. Final Cut handles this fine internally, but has problems communicating its ‘dark metadata’ to other systems to fully re-substantiate a complex edit. We needed something more robust for full Premiere integration.”

Koetter found that even Adobe’s own Premiere project files were never really designed as an edit interchange format, having no documented public open API. So CNN began consulting with Adobe to find a way of decoupling an editor into a client/ server ecosystem.

By working with the streaming video provided under the Adobe Anywhere concept, CNN encouraged a more powerful way to interact between their media management and workflow systems and the craft editing bays.

“This took away the brittle process of exchanging project files and got into the idea of having a server hold all our edit projects. So we worked with Adobe to make sure the API for that server can support everything we need to get into and out of an edit,” Koetter said. “Now journalists can create enhanced edit instructions to be sent to the craft bay, and collect other aspects like graphics elements which need to be included. With Adobe Anywhere, all of the intelligence that has been created with a project is immediately available to the finishing process without having to endlessly search through various storage levels. It’s all just right there.”

In the end, when I asked if the ultimate goal of this transition is to become “all Adobe.” Koetter replied, “that is correct.

“It’s a big lift to replace so many systems in our core editing environment,” he said, “ and we are trying to incorporate it in the natural replacement cycle for our infrastructure. With Adobe we’ve found a partnership that has opened many future possibilities for CNN.”

Jay Ankeney is a freelance editor and post-production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him atjayankeney@mac.com.