Monday, September 10th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe announces Adobe Anywhere


Nvidia interviews Adobe’s Matthew Gyves about Adobe Anywhere at IBC 2012. (Warning: variable sound quality. For a studio recording, play the demo on Adobe TV.)

Adobe has announced Adobe Anywhere, its upcoming ‘collaborative platform’ for editing and visual effects.

The system, which will come built in to future releases of Premiere Pro, After Effects and Prelude, enables users to work on assets located on a central server from anywhere in the world.

Instead of editing or rendering files locally, all of the operations are performed on the server side, with the output streamed to the user’s machine.

Full res in real time
Unlike traditional proxy-based systems, Adobe claims that Adobe Anywhere is capable of streaming the original full-resolution image in real time over a standard network connection.

It supports all of the same file formats as the software itself, and runs on “standard IT networks”.

The result, in theory, should be the ability to work on files from anywhere in the world, and never notice that they’re not actually located on your own internal network.

Powered by the GPU
The system is based on the new Mercury Streaming Engine. Like Premiere Pro’s Mercury Playback Engine, it can run on the GPU – although it isn’t clear if it will be as hardware-agnostic.

According to fxguide, Adobe will have ‘blessed’ hardware configurations, “including CUDA-enabled NVIDIA cards”. We aren’t sure whether that means the Streaming Engine supports only CUDA, or whether it, like the Playback Engine, supports AMD cards via OpenCL.

Due in 2013
The system is still in development, so some questions remain to be answered: in particular, we’d be interested in Adobe’s take on the security implications of enabling users to view full-res footage remotely.

However, fxguide has a good interview with Adobe senior product manager Michael Coleman, in which they conclude the system has the potential to be “quite brilliant”.

Adobe Anywhere is due for release in 2013, but there are no pricing details yet. If you’re interested, you can contact Adobe via the email link on the Adobe Anywhere microsite.

Read more about Adobe Anywhere on Adobe’s microsite

Read fxguide’s article on Adobe Anywhere