Adobe today announced Adobe Anywhere for video, an in-development technology that the company says will allow multiple users of Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Prelude to collaborate by accessing centralized media and assets from any location.

 

Adobe Anywhere will run on standard Gigabit Ethernet networks, the company said. A fat pipe between the Adobe Anywhere server and the remote workstation is not required, because most of the heavy lifting is done on the server. Thus, a user can composite an image using multiple HD layers, but upon playback only a relatively lightweight viewing stream is sent to the laptop. Changes made to a shared timeline are immediately available to other users.

 

Streaming is handled by a system Adobe calls the Mercury Streaming Engine, echoing the GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine that's already built into Premiere Pro and After Effects. An "intelligent codec" will scale the quality of playback based on the available bandwidth. Adobe said content should be viewable on small laptop or tablet screens via a Wi-Fi network. A 3G cellular network would enable "management views."

 

In a demo video (below), Adobe's senior product manager for pro video, Michael Coleman, said the system was being driven by standard hardware behind the scenes, using Nvidia GPU processing and an Omneon MediaGrid for storage.

 

 

Adobe Anywhere will be demonstrated at IBC in Amsterdam this week. But don't go looking for product updates on the Adobe website just yet — Adobe Anywhere will be built only into future releases of Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Prelude. For more on Adobe Anywhere for video, visit the Adobe website: www.adobe.com/go/anywhere.

 

In other news from Adobe, a new promo gives Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer switchers a 30 percent discount on CS6 Production Premium or 40 percent off an annual Adobe Creative Cloud membership. More info is on the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/go/premiere_switch.