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Home » Adobe’s Current Woes, Coming Glory

Adobe’s Current Woes, Coming Glory

If you’ve kept track of the tech details related to Apple’s iPad announcement, it’s been pretty hard to miss Steve Job’s dismissal of Adobe Flash for the new device—he’s already made known that it has no place in the iPhone OS.

It’s not personal, of course, since so many Mac-based creatives rely on Adobe’s justly top-of-the-heap Photoshop, After Effects, et.al.

You can catch up with some of Job’s arguments in Ryan Tate’s article in Valleywag which details what happened when Jobs presented the iPad to Wall Street Journal editorial staff

Flash, as Adobe seems to constantly point out, is nearly everywhere on the Web and installed in computers as well, helping to make the Internet colorful with animation and graphics. Jobs’ anti-Flash arguments are fairly well known too: that Flash consumes too many CPU cycles, presents too many security holes, and finally is an out-dated technology—something he doesn’t want forward looking iPhone and iPad users to contend with.

But while Tate describes Jobs’ as “brazen in his dismissal of Flash”, the reasons are more complex than those most noised about. John Gruber on his Daring Firelball blog says “the larger issue goes beyond performance. Apple sees the web as a platform based on open standards. Flash isn’t part of that.”

Even if those performance issues are finally solved, Gruber argues, Apple won’t include it in the iPhone OS since, as he believes, Apple wants to control that whole OS. Apple is keeping the iPad OS closed too, something that’s not been the case with OS X (for which Jobs has blamed Flash for a great number of Mac crashes and other flaky performance issues).

To replace Flash, Jobs and Apple are pushing the interactive capabilities in HTML5, an open source standard not controllable by any one company. (HTML5 is a huge rewrite of the code that underlies the whole Web, so it will be implemented over a very long–in Web years–12 year time frame from now, even though some minor capabilities are now working with a first considerable stage planned by 2012. There’s more about this complex roll-out here.)

But on 9to5 Mac, Seth Weintraub in a blog entitled “The upcoming Apple vs. Flash battle” says that bringing tools to market to build interactive applications rivaling those now on hand for Flash/AIR are “years away at best”.

While Weintraub agrees that the first mobile devices running Flash will burn through batteries, he thinks the situation will improve quickly with more potent CPUs and GPUs coming to market. This will actually benefit Apple’s rival Android, as devices with Flash “instantly have more “applications” on them than the iPhone.”

So all is not gloomy in Adobe-land. Even of more import to anyone creating graphics and editing video, says millimeter’s Trevor Boyer, is Adobe’s upcoming release of Creative Suite 5, which will charge forward with support for 64-bit operation only (OSX 10.6 or Win7 64) while introducing the Mercury Playback Engine, a completely retooled codec wrangler.

The latter will supposedly be a game changer compared to what’s currently available as it uses a computer’s GPU (i.e. Nvidia only at this point) and CPU in parallel to deliver capabilities including real-time debayering of Red camera files (Red sells a $5k card to do that now), native Red 4K multicam editing, and Red keying; speedy AVCHD playback and scrubbing; zipping through nine layers of P2 files at a time; and accelerated rendering for exports.

Mercury is set to support Geforce GTX285, nVidia Quadro CX,FX4800, or FX580, with newer nVidia cards added to the list as they are released.

At the moment all of that quick, speedy editing comes courtesy of Adobe’s upcoming CS5 Premiere NLE only (look for it in late Spring). Photoshop and After Effects will surely have speed ups of their own going 64-bit native and supporting Nvidia’s Cuda architecture, but so far the Mercury Playback Engine looks like an Adobe exclusive.

Whether that makes it any more attractive to Avid and Final Cut Pro users doesn’t look probable, but the technology, bundled tightly within the whole CS5 suite, could prove attractive to many more potential users worldwide. It should be especially tempting to those shooting HD with DSLRs from Canon, Nikon, and others; this fast growing contingent is one Adobe will be targeting with the new suite. And why not? They’re one group already overwhelmingly tied to Photoshop as their top app.

About Dan Ochiva

New York City-based journalist and NYCPPNEWS founder Dan Ochiva writes and consults on film, video, and digital media technology.

Community & Partner Links

How Sony’s New Virtual Sound Technology Can Change How We Hear Films

Kami Asgar and Jessica Parks are post-production heavyweights who work with major studios, namely Sony. As a sound designer (Asgar) and as a post executive (Parks), their collective resume touches on everything from Apocalypto to Grandma’s Boy to Venom.

Parks has recently shifted her focus from supervisor to hands-on sound design, and we talk about how it’s never too late to pivot on your career path and find the thing you love doing wherever you are in life.

Click on this link to read the rest of the article on No Film School’s site.

NJ – Governor Murphy signs $14B Incentive Program Bill – the NJ Economic Recovery Act of 2020

 Film tax credits — amending existing programs to include provisions for so-called New Jersey film partners and New Jersey film-lease partners and allowing an additional $200 million of tax credits annually over 13 years.

Click this link if you want to read the full article on the Lexology site. http://bit.ly/35NtDx6

Film Commish announces date for production restart

In her December 18, 2020 news update, MOME Commissioner Anne del Castillo announced that the Film Office is now accepting permit applications for production activity that begins on July 27th.

She also announced awards now (Awkwafina) and more. To read all of the Film Commish’s bloggy sort of news column, click here.

Stimulus Offers $15 Billion in Relief for Struggling Arts Venues

The coronavirus relief package that Congressional leaders agreed to this week includes grant money that many small proprietors described as a last hope for survival.

For the music venue owners, theater producers and cultural institutions that have suffered through the pandemic with no business, the coronavirus relief package that Congress passed on Monday night offers the prospect of aid at last.

To read the full article on The New York Times’ site, click here.

If you want to start production, here’s the latest news from the Mayor’s Office

Phase 4 production guidance is available on the Film Permit website. All production activity, whether it requires a Film Permit or not, must comply with New York Forward Industry Guidance.

For more information see, please refer to the State Department of Health’s Interim Guidance for Media Production During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Please review the guidelines and FAQ before submitting permit applications. The Film Office is operating remotely, so please allow additional time for Film Permit processing.

The above paragraphs contain links to the various FAQ – just mouse over the relevant words.

Nikon to Stop Making Cameras in Japan

Nikon has fallen on hard times as of late as its camera sales have cratered, and now there’s a new indicator of how dire its financial situation is: the company is reportedly pulling the plug on making cameras in Japan after over 70 years of doing so.

To read the full article on Petapixel’s site, click here.

NVIDIA Uses AI to Slash Bandwidth on Video Calls

NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality

What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.

To read the rest of this article on Petapixel, click this link.

 

 

 

Union Health Plan Dodges Film Workers’ Suit Over Virus Relief

Law360 (October 9, 2020, 5:22 PM EDT) — The Motion Picture Industry Health Plan’s board can’t be sued under ERISA for allegedly flouting its duties when it relaxed plan rules in response to COVID-19, a California federal judge has ruled, nixing a proposed class action filed by two cinematographers who still couldn’t qualify for benefits.

In an order entered Thursday, U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner granted the board of directors’ motion to dismiss Greg Endries and Dee Nichols’ Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit accusing board members of breaching their duty to treat all plan participants fairly.

Endries and Nichols, members of Local 600 of the International Cinematographers Guild, said in July that the board left them and others “out in the cold” in its attempts to address the problems COVID-19 caused for plan participants.

But Judge Klausner agreed with the board’s contention that the case, which alleged a fiduciary breach, should be tossed because plan administrators don’t act as fiduciaries when they amend health care plans.

Read the full article on the Law360 site by clicking here.

Russo Brothers Received Close to $50 Million From Saudi Bank

Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo photographed at the PMC Studio in Los Angeles for the Variety Playback Podcast.

The Russo brothers, directors of the all-time top grossing film “Avengers: Endgame,” quietly secured a roughly $50 million cash infusion for their production company AGBO from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, multiple sources tell Variety.

In a deal brokered and closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the Russos received the investment from an undisclosed Saudi bank in exchange for a minority stake in the brothers’ Los Angeles-based shop.

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