Adobe Anywhere: A Game Changer for Cloud Editing

Screenlight by Chris Potter

One of the big stories at IBC was the announcement of Adobe Anywhere, a new collaborative workflow platform for video editors, loggers, and motion graphics professionals that will be introduced in 2013.

The platform will enable Prelude, Premiere Pro, and After Effects users to work together from anywhere by accessing a centralized media server. It promises to erase the boundary between facilities based and remote editing.

As details of the announcement have been covered elsewhere, I'll focus on the benefits of Adobe's approach and how it differs from other cloud editing services. I'll also add my thoughts on who it's going to be targeted at initially, how it will be priced, and the hardware requirements.

Before we begin, we'll need to cover some of the basics.

Adobe Anywhere Explained

As mentioned above, Adobe Anywhere is a collaboration software platform that customers will run on a centralized server connected to shared storage in one of their facilities. This could be a broadcast studio, a production facility, or a corporate data center.

Editors will be able to login to the Adobe Anywhere server from anywhere using forthcoming versions of Premiere Pro, Prelude or After Effects. Once connected, they will be able to work on shared projects using centralized media. This will look exactly the same as working with local media. If editors want to incorporate local footage into a shared project, they can add it to their timeline, and it will be transparently copied to the Adobe Anywhere server while they work. Once the footage finishes uploading, other people on the project will have access to it. read more...