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Reader SurveyNAB 2008
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Perspective on this year’s show.
Q&A: Adobe's Simon Hayhurst on NAB
By Jan Ozer
With Apple and Avid choosing to skip NAB, I was curious as to Adobe’s thoughts about the value of the show to them, and why they stayed in. Once I started talking with Simon Hayhurst, senior director of product management for Adobe’s Dynamic Media Organization, several other questions came to mind, and we ended up chatting for about an hour or so—starting with NAB, and then ranging into topics such as the success of CS3 on the Mac platform, the future of video editing products, Adobe’s P2 support, and the long-term value of metadata.
DCP: What is the value of NAB to Adobe’s audio and video production tools business?
Hayhurst: When I think of NAB, I see 110,000 people from the broadcast industry gathered in one place. It’s phenomenal the business that gets done. Contacts at NAB ultimately led to a significant deal with the BBC and other remarkable deals across multiple geographies and industries that I can’t yet identify.
Over the last 24 months, we roughly doubled our tools business, and that’s in a market that growing at 11 percent to 13 percent annually. It’s clear we’re taking business away from someone, and our goal is to again double our business over the next two years. To do that, we have to double down and invest more.
Obviously, if you’re losing share, it’s a different problem altogether—you really have to figure out where to invest your marketing dollars. For us, at this stage of our business, NAB is the single most significant thing we can do to drive our business.
It’s been twelve months since you launched the Macintosh product line. What’s the market response?
We thought we were offering a strong value proposition to the Mac market—a fully re-architected, end-to-end solution with great suite integration. Though we set our targets high, we reached our first year goals in a month.
So we had to reset and rethink. Now, we’re seeing the percentage of Mac sales pretty close to the overall Mac business for After Effects. I have to say, it’s a nice validation of both our product and pricing strategy. Producers obviously see the value of an affordable upgrade path for Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects, plus the unique value of OnLocation and Ultra. They also get Blu-ray production and Flash publishing in Encore and complete Flash design in Flash.
Do you think you’re displacing Final Cut Pro desktops?
Probably not at this point. Most current Final Cut Pro users will probably keep on upgrading, and use Premiere Pro when Dynamic Link offers a unique but probably discrete advantage in solving a particular production problem. Clearly, though, lots of Final Cut Pro users are buying—and using—the suite.
Equally important is now that we’re in the Mac market, we’re also getting our share of new editors, which we can now support in both major operating systems. Overall, we’ve seen remarkable adoption of the suite value proposition.
I know you’re proud of your Panasonic P2 workflow. What can you tell me about it?
When we first started looking at the P2 workflow, we sat down and thought about the future—we really wanted to focus on the problems and workflows that will be coming. We saw the world as tapeless, with producers publishing online, on-air, on-device, onscreen, and on-disc. It’s all very complex—what will the world look like when there are 500,000 channels?
Our vision on tapeless was to be metadata rich (never do harm to metadata) and with P2, to be completely native—no wrapping and rewrapping, no intermediate codecs, no transcoding. In our workflow, Premiere Pro takes in the P2 video natively, retains all the metadata, edits it natively, and if you want to send it back the camera, it’s easy, because it’s native.
I first heard you talking about metadata last year at NAB. Why do you think it’s so important?
Metadata is incredibly important going forward. It contains information about the clips, it could be alternates, scene and take information, GPS data, and even who’s in the shot. Ultimately, it will get richer and richer—especially as more and more video gets delivered in digital formats that can really leverage the metadata, and let viewers leverage the metadata.
Think of how useful this information is to television stations and movie studios, and even event videographers building libraries of digital content. Preserving metadata will streamline production and add value to each bit of content.
Imagine being able to search movies and jump to a scene, like “Here’s looking at you kid” ... or finding out where that car commercial was shot because you’d love to go there. For content owners and advertisers, it’s also about being able to provide ads that are more relevant (hence less annoying and ultimately more profitable) ... like being able to put a BMW ad against any scene that has a BMW car in it.
It could even add value during editing—quickly being able to provide short-lists of scenes or enabling quick cross-referencing.
At a minimum, we feel like we have to build our workflows so that the editing process doesn’t change the metadata—it comes across as is and the taxonomies remain consistent. So our P2 workflow leaves metadata in its native format, keeping things clean and simple.
Why did you decide against using an intermediate format?
On a powerful workstation today, you can get good editing performance with any P2 compatible format, including DVCPRO HD 1080i. So why use an intermediate codec that’s not going to be your final output? Any transcode can only degrade video quality; it certainly can’t improve it.
What about AVCHD?
As you know, we don’t currently support AVCHD, but an intermediate format may make sense for a long-GOP format. That’s because long-GOP formats, particularly AVCHD, are harder to decode, and editing can get very unresponsive.
It feels like editors in general are all very mature with a similar feature set. How will we differentiate editors going forward?
Basic editing is pretty mature. The big leverage points will be how we eliminate pains in the workflow, like the metadata issues we just talked about. Also important is how well the editor makes the media we produce friendly to online distribution—as you know, there are lots of challenges on the aspect ratio side with mobile devices. And this is just one example.
It’s no surprise that going forward, we predict that more and more video will be delivered via streaming. Some people question why Flash, Flash Media Server, and the Adobe Media Player are in the same product group as our content creation tools. But this helps us focus on the end-to-end workflow. Since our Premiere Pro team works with our Flash team, they hear the mobile device workflow pain, which is how we ended up with a product like Adobe Device Central.
Same with Adobe Media Player and the Flash Media Server—having them work together with the content creation teams makes all the discrete parts innovate more quickly over the complete workflow.
Similarly, user-needs sharpened our focus and drove our decision to add H.264 support to the Flash Player and Adobe Media Player. As the world moves increasingly online, the presence of Flash video becomes more and more important. Now that the Adobe Media Player provides producers and viewers a secure, monetizable standalone viewing platform, the footprint for flash video grows, and consolidation towards a clear standard helps.
Our suite approach and server products simplify capture, editing, encoding and delivery to the hundreds of millions of devices that ultimately converge on H.264. Throw in the hardware accelerated playback we just introduced, and the increased security for both streaming and disk-based playback, and you’ve got a wonderful solution for producers and viewers.
And you have to ask why I’m excited about going to NAB?
