Adobe Rockstars

By Adobe

When graphic designers at Wired magazine sit down to create the next issue, they fire up Adobe InDesign and Adobe digital publishing software. When visual effects specialists begin work on major motion pictures such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, they launch Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium software.

We’ve all come to expect the stunningly realistic visuals that these tools create in all the media that we consume. But we sometimes forget that even the tiniest product innovation started as the seed of an idea in someone’s mind, somewhere within the halls of Adobe, long before growing into the industry standard it is today.

Where do these ideas come from? Everywhere. In fact, that’s one of our mantras: Good ideas come from everywhere in the company. And with more than 11,000 employees around the world, we have no shortage of good ideas.

We talked to three of Adobe’s most prolific and well-known idea people to get the scoop on what they do, how they do it, why they love it—and why they’ve chosen Adobe as their home when their talent and experience could land them virtually any job in the industry.

Enzo Guerrera Principal Scientist

Q: What are some of the most exciting innovations you’ve been able to work on at Adobe?
A: The Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere was an exciting innovation because we moved effects processing and image manipulation from the central processing unit (CPU) to the graphics processing unit (GPU). That enabled a huge performance increase. Another example is what we did when we rewrote Premiere for multicore processing, which led to even more performance gains. Our goal was to have Premiere be so high-performing that when you were holding the shuttle control and moving it back and forth along your video timeline, you couldn’t distinguish a difference between doing that in your software and doing it on your old hardware editing system. We gave the user that tight feedback so they can get editing timing down perfectly. read more...