I’ve just gotten back from a week in Los Angeles, where I did a few important things: Rode the Jurassic Park ride 10 times at Universal Studios, interviewed Mr Eko from Lost (and the upcoming prequel to The Thing), watched Liam Finn perform outside American supermarket chain Wholefoods (he was awesome as expected)… and called in at the Scientology Celebrity Centre.
When I wasn’t doing that stuff, I was at Adobe’s annual MAX conference at the LA Convention Centre. You know Adobe – the guys who make Photoshop. And Premiere. And Flash. You get the idea.
Usually I’m at the venue for E3, the giant videogames expo – which is absolutely mental. MAX is a bit more subdued – a chance for graphics nerds and developers to come together for workshops and to learn about what stuff Adobe has planned for the future. There were a lovely bunch of creative types from New Zealand attending, including Lawrence Smith from Cabbage Tree Creative in Christchurch. Of course there were a whole lot more from across the globe too - I met people from Russia, Japan, Brazil and Canada… the list goes on.
It became pretty clear how big this event was from the giant screen on stage. It was the biggest I’ve ever seen in action, and the Adobe guys told me it set some kind of new world record.
The thing wrapped around the left and right of stage, too, so big my poor wee camera couldn’t capture it all.
The first thing that became pretty apparent was a focus on Tablets. The iPad and iPad2 have clearly changed the game, and Adobe knows it, so we’ve got a whole bunch of touch apps. The highlight for me was Photoshop Touch, which includes a bunch of features a novice like me can use to select specific elements of an image (they call it the “scribble selection tool”) and manipulate them. There’s also a bunch of built-in features that allow easy upload to social networking sites Twitter and Facebook.
Collage is pretty neat, in that it automatically syncs images between your desktop, tablet and (for example) iPhone, making images a lot easier to keep a track of. Proto also shows heaps of promise for web developers, in that it allows you to easily mock up a website using touch controls to see what it will look like for clients. What’s cool is that it saves some really streamlined code of what you’re doing layout-wise, so you can keep working with it when you actually go to build the site. It doesn’t go to waste.
For whatever reason (and theories abounded), Adobe chose to talk about a bunch of stuff, including Flash, at the same time Apple was announcing the iPhone 4s. It was fascinating to look down at others in the crowd as I’d say at least 40 percent were keeping an eye on live blogs from the Apple media conference, while also listening to what was being said in front of them. What was being said is that Flash’s focus is really on gaming, and to clarify this they had the CEO of Epic Games (Unreal, Gears of War) Tim Sweeney take to the stage. Now Sweeney is a legend. I talked to him afterwards about the very first videogame I ever purchased (Unreal), and he cracked up, telling me he wrote about 275,000 lines of code in a basement to make Unreal a reality. He’s the ultimate geek, prone to saying words like “gosh” a lot, and clearly nervous in front of a large crowd.
And it was in front of this large crowd that he demoed Unreal Tournament 3 working in Flash 11, which can crank some stuff 1000 times faster than the prior version. It was a surreal thing to watch, Unreal running in browser without dropping a single frame. I remember spending a lot of money to upgrade to a Voodoo 2 graphics card and more RAM back in 1998 just to view outdoor scenes in the first Unreal. Now I’m watching UT3 in a browser! It was delightful, and shows how far we’ve come.
“The browser is the console,” was the catchphrase on the day. On the main convention floor they had a bunch of over developers showing off Flash games, including one that caught my eye, AlternativaPlatform’s Tanki Online, boasted as “the world’s first multiplayer online 3D Flash game”. Sure, Adobe still sees Flash as a tool for websites as well – but with HTML5 being able to do so much cool stuff, it seems many of their Flash team are thinking “games” specifically.
Another highlight of the conference was a thing called “Sneaks”, where they basically wheeled the ultimate nerds on stage to show off what they’ve been developing. Some of it may end up in future Adobe products; some of it may be scrapped.
Hosting the evening was Rainn Wilson, known by many as Dwight from The Office (I’m more a fan of his Six Feet Under weirdness). He was great as an MC, openly ribbing many of the Photoshop geeks as they took to the stage, and reminding us we were in the same room in which he’d “lost three Emmy awards”. He eventually gave up trying to engage with many of them, simply saying things like “so that’s a script? Great scripting, man!” and “oh you built that in Flash HMTL5, nice one buddy!” when he clearly had no idea what was going on. “And our next guest is going to show us how to shift a semi-colon around the screen!”
And boy, did the Adobe nerds have some cool stuff up their sleeves. One Photoshop plug-in managed to do some really cool stuff with layers - instead of just placing one layer behind another layer, you could weave layers in and out of each other, in real time.
Another plug-in took blurred photos, calculated the motion of the camera that mucked up the photo, and “reversed” the motion – voila! Crystal clear photo. Some of the stuff in Premiere was amazing, too. A chap from Japan created a bit of syncing software that let you re-voice someone, and then automatically syncs it with the actors lip movements. Another took crowd-sourced gig footage from YouTube and automatically synced up all the tracks, no matter the quality or length of the track (sure bands will be happy with this).
But the coolest tool by far was something that let you manipulate the 3D space of a piece of video in Premiere. This allows you to, for example, change the focal length of the virtual lens, or even change where a character is placed in the shot. It’s all rendered on-the-fly and looks gorgeous. Who knows what features will make it to future versions of the various pieces of software, but it really does reinforce the crazy amount of development that goes on behind the scenes.
After about 200 sessions you could attend (I think I fitted in about 6), the MAX conference ended with a concert by none other than Weezer. I was delighted to see Josh Freese on drumming duties (he’s usually found with A Perfect Circle, Devo, and the now defunct Nine Inch Nails).
Freese tore it up and frontman Rivers Cuomo even freestyled a song with the lyrics “Adobe, Adobe, Adobe.” I guess if you’re going to sell out, you might as well really sell out.