NEWS
AMP'd Up
Welcome to Adobe's Media Ecosystem
by Michael Kunkes
 Adobe Media Player playing an episode of CBS' CSI. When merchandise seen in the show is available to be purchased online, content providers can opt to enable an overlay advertisement (like the sunglasses in the lower right-hand corner) that will link to the merchandise online. |
On April 9, Adobe’s Dynamic Media Division released the new Adobe Media Player (AMP), a free desktop-embedded media player and management application, providing HD-quality playback of streamed, downloaded or locally stored video. Users will be able to subscribe (through RSS feeds downloaded automatically) to TV shows, video podcasts, movie and other targeted online content.
The Adobe Media Player, whether used offline or online, is built around the idea of leveraging Adobe’s Flash media architecture and CS3 creative product line as the hub of an emerging “media ecosystem” that will provide content creators with integrated and customized branding, advertising and especially monetization opportunities, by selling site licenses with Flash Media Server 3 software, or working with existing partners. The free Adobe Media Player, which has been in private Beta for a year since being announced last year at NAB, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
Some might say we don’t need yet another desktop media player, but according to Adobe, the numbers don’t lie. In the US alone, 134 million internet users watched nine billion video clips last year, 75 percent watch video online, with the average viewer watching three hours a month. And of the top ten fastest growing video sites, all use Flash video, and seven out of ten use Flash exclusively. And the cool thing about Adobe Media Player is that you no longer have to load Flash Video files into an existing Flash Video player. Just double-click, and AMP will launch and play the video.
 Jim Guerard, Adobe's vice president and general manger of Dynamic Media. |
For editors, directors, producers and others in the production and post pipelines, the benefits of the Adobe media culture––which includes Adobe Premiere Creative Suite 3 and the entire CS3 suite of integrated programs––will be obvious. With the addition of the H.264 MPEG-4 video compression codec, Flash now has the ability to scale up and provide true HD video across the web, and global penetration of Flash MPEG-4 was expected to reach 80 percent by the NAB 2008. According to Jim Guerard, Adobe’s vice president and general manager of Dynamic Media, “We are also introducing new digital rights management technology and are continuing to improve how people can protect and consume content. We’ve always had the ability to do secure streaming on the Flash Media Server, but we’ve now added the capability to add downloadable content to the desktop in a secure, protected environment, and that’s a new step for us.”
The ability to create personalized content publishing, combined with the improved security of the Flash Media Server 3 is one reason Hollywood should stand up and take notice of AMP. Guerard points out that as Adobe partners with more and larger content owners, its plan is to reach out to broadcasters and larger studios to set up digital rights management solutions as well as to help them set up channels to get studio content into the Adobe Media Player, although these plans are still in their formative stages. “CS3 finally brought all-new versions of all the Adobe creative software back to the Mac, and major entities are starting to make the move to CS3; most notably the BBC, which just moved to standardize all of its film and broadcast production through Adobe CS3 tools,” he reveals. “Also, our DVD authoring solution is the only one that offers Blu-ray––which Apple doesn’t currently support.”
 Michael Kanfer, one of Adobe's business development managers for the Dynamic Media Organization. |
Michael Kanfer, a visual effects supervisor and 1998 Oscar winner for Titanic, joined the company in 2005 as one of Adobe’s business development managers for the Dynamic Media Organization. He says that the Adobe Media Player and CS3 production tools will join forces to form an unbeatable end-to-end workflow. “Together, the Adobe Media Player and CS3 Production Premium offer an amazing toolset for reviewing dailies, as well as getting remote approvals,” Kanfer says. “Using our clip notes feature, editors will be able to send out a compressed version of a project’s timeline embedded in a .pdf document that allows the viewer to park at any timecode, make a comment and send it back––and the comments will come up as markers back in the Premiere Pro timeline. With that in mind, we’re working on ways to do both written as well as drawn comments during remote review and teleconferencing sessions.”
Kanfer adds that with editors being asked to do more and more temp comps for effects shots, there will be a greater need to review and comment on the material beyond how it looks in the context of a cut. “The Media Player is going to be a huge hit in dailies, because finally we have the encryption, the DRM, the resolution and the playback speed,” he explains. “The minute you don’t have one of these, you are out of the running. Whether an editor is working in HD or a smaller proxy format, we have the ability to go right out of Premiere using the built-in Media Encoder and into the player. It’s a new way of sending and receiving material.”
 The Adobe Media Player home page user interface. |
Of course, an all-Adobe pipeline would see video edited on Premiere, encoded into Flash and then streamed from a Flash Media Server to the Adobe Media Player. That scenario may have to wait a bit, since Adobe Premiere has not yet gained wide acceptance in feature films. “We don’t force people to use our editor,” explains Kanfer. “You can cut in Avid or Final Cut and easily send EDLs and AAF data to Premiere for conforming.” Some high-profile recent projects, including Superman Returns, The Good Shepherd and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and his new Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light, have had their HD conforms done through Premiere Pro. “It works very nicely for that––especially if you go into the job knowing you need a lot of opticals and effects, because through Adobe Dynamic Link, you don’t need to render your shot in After Effects to have it appear as a clip in the timeline of your editor,” he continues. “That is a huge time savings.”
“Our group’s mission was to blend Adobe’s content creation tools around video and motion graphics with streaming Flash media, and provide a system that allows people to create content at the highest levels of professionalism, and deliver that media across both traditional and new media,” Guerard adds. “This is all about consumer behavior causing changes in the way people consume and modify content.”
To download the Adobe Media Player, go to http://www.adobe.com/go/mp.
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