Become a contributor to Adobe Stock

Yesterday Adobe announced the public beta of the Adobe Stock Contributor website, a new platform where you can sell photos, illustrations, videos, and vector graphics directly to the world’s largest creative community. By contributing to Adobe Stock, you can showcase your work to millions of creatives right inside Creative Cloud apps. The platform is fully functional but still in beta, so feedback is welcome through the Adobe Stock Contributor forum.

One major new feature is auto-keywording, a time-saving feature that uses machine learning to automatically generate the first five keywords of each image you submit. It’ll be interesting to see if this technology can generate emotional keywords like “joy” that could help worthy content to stand out from the crowd.




Adobe has integrated Stock contributor submission directly within Creative Cloud applications, though it’s not required. During the beta phase, you’ll have the ability to upload images to Adobe Stock directly from Lightroom CC and Bridge CC, which were also just updated and released. Adobe plans to open submissions to more content types in additional CC applications soon.

There’s a 33% commission for photos and vector art, and a 35% commission for videos, “based on the price of the image.” A payout request via Paypal or Skrill is available when you have reach $50 (or Euros) in royalties (allow 7 days for payment). Check out Adobe Stock itself for info on the range of pricing.

You can visit the Adobe Stock HelpX page for general information. See also a tutorial on how to search, download, and license royalty-free video footage from Adobe Stock via the Creative Cloud Libraries panel inside Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC.

Here's an Adobe Stock Contributor Spotlight sharing one contributor's experience:

SF Cutters March 16: 11th Anniversary

SF Cutters is meeting March 16th -- the 11th Anniversary of the 1st ever FCPUG. Back then Sharon Franklin presented on the Option key in Final Cut; Adam Wilt was an audience member.

This meeting is planned for 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM at Adobe in San Francisco. Tickets available online; capacity is limited. Here's the current agenda:

• AE guru Matt Silverman of Bonfire Labs
• Jeff Way of AJA ( Ki Pro and Ki Pro Mini) and Michael Gee with the Panasonic AF100
• an Adobe presentation
• Raffle prizes
• 6:30 - 7:00, Pizza and Drinks
• Sponsor and vendor tables

Steve Forde: new product manager for After Effects

Steve Forde, founder and former CTO of GridIron Software (makers of Nucleo Pro), is the new product manager of Adobe After Effects [update].

He's taking over for Michael Coleman, who is "staying in video product management at Adobe, working on some new things." Coleman took over the reins in 2007 from Steve Kilisky, who later joined GenArts.

Update: Spontaneous ovation! See serious love for @sforde from @Aeny (care of @Filmbot & @ABAOProductions)

And later, Steve has a blog...

Photoframd claims CS5.5 is in the works [or CS 6]

Update: Apple Insider has some similar material in Documents may offer sneak peek at Adobe's plans for Creative Suite 6. And soon afterward, PC Magazine summarized the most recent survey too in Adobe Creative Suite 6 to Include New HTML5 Tool, Survey Says.

Photoframd is reporting on a planned update: CS5.5. This is the only reference that can be found easily, so it's a rumor at this point -- but it does make sense considering the position of the Flash platform on mobile technology. Photframd thinks an update would be at the price of "either a flat fee for the update or a monthly subscription for continued updates throughout the year."

They don't report on an update to Photoshop. Their section on the video apps is below; the possible AE update looks better than what's listed for Premiere, but not in the same class as the powerhouse 4.1 or 5.5 updates:

Adobe After Effects CS5.5

Design compelling motion graphics and produce visual effects using the industry standard for compositing and animation. Standing out from the background in today’s media-saturated culture requires the visual richness that only Adobe After Effects CS5.5 can deliver. Create compelling motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects with tools that deliver unparalleled performance and complete creative control, and save time thanks to tools that help you get the job done efficiently. After Effects harnesses the potential of metadata to optimize today’s production pipelines, and tight integration with Photoshop and leading other Adobe tools ensure your work flows smoothly. Whether you’re working in broadcast, film, or delivering work online or to emerging devices, Adobe After Effects CS5.5 is a must-have tool.

New After Effects CS5.5

• Remote Render Queue Monitoring: Monitor the progress of your renders from the web or on mobile devices. Get instant updates if your render encounters a problem, and be notified the moment a render is complete.
• Persistent Disk Caching: Minimize the need to re-render frames and see previews more quickly as you work by saving previews to disk on a per layer and per comp basis.
• Enhanced Stereoscopic 3D workflows: More easily set up stereo camera rigs inside of After Effects and render from multiple cameras without duplicating the comp.
• Source timecode support: More easily communicate frame-accurate information with others using the same project footage in other post-production tools.
• Small changes that make a big difference to your daily workflow
• New support for importing and exporting tapeless formats

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5

Craft your story efficiently, thanks to the superior performance that Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 delivers. Work faster with the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, which offers native 64-bit support and GPU acceleration so you can edit complex, high resolution projects fluidly. Edit virtually anything, thanks to broad, native tapeless camera support that eliminates transcoding and rewrapping, seamless Adobe integration, and easy project exchange with Final Cut Pro and Avid editing software. With capabilities that extend beyond the edit suite to pre-production and delivery, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 delivers a fluid, high-performance workflow with professional results.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 includes Adobe Encore CS5 and Adobe OnLocation CS5. Adobe Encore CS5 software is a versatile, interactive authoring tool you can use to deliver projects for DVD, Blu-ray Disc, or a web version of your disc project. Adobe OnLocation CS5 software is a powerful, direct-to-disk recording, logging, and monitoring solution — helping you create high quality, metadata-rich assets and effortlessly move your ideas from planning into production.

New in Premiere Pro CS5.5

• Faster performance and stability with enhanced Mercury Playback Engine - Work dramatically faster thanks to sweeping performance and stability enhancements in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Open projects faster, scrub through HD and higher-resolution footage more fluidly, and play back complex long-format and effects-heavy projects more reliably.
• Get up to speed quickly with Adobe Premiere Pro if you know other NLEs - Take advantage of the most requested editing enhancements, which add up to big productivity gains and smoother day-to-day workflows. Powerful editing and user interface enhancements simplify everyday tasks, making a big difference in your workflow whether you’re an experienced Adobe Premiere Pro user or you’re more familiar with Final Cut Pro or Avid software.
• Expanded native tapeless workflow - Adding to existing support for P2, XDCAM, AVCHD and DSLR cameras, new native support for the latest tapeless camera formats means you never waste valuable production time transcoding or rewrapping and always have access to the original file’s pristine quality.
• Closed captioning support - Easily create closed captioning and subtitles. Output video with captioning to tape and disc as well as to formats for web playback that meet Section 508 standards.

Adobe NAB 2010 presentations: Foundry plug-ins + more

Adobe is making some of their NAB 2010 presentations available. It seems a bit Flash-heavy from a distance.

Here's Jim Geduldick, After Effects artist at Offhollywood and leader of the popular AENY user group, who shows how the new features in After Effects CS5—as well as new 64-bit plug-ins from The Foundry—are being used in production (if the audio behaves). There's also Rich Harrington highlighting some of the new features for video professionals in Photoshop CS5.

CS5 announcement on April 12

The countdown to the launch of Adobe CS5 suites has begun (via #csbuzz). You can register for the event and look at sneak peeks at http://cs5launch.adobe.com.

Update: See also the very cool Sneak peek video of Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop via John Nack. Older sneak peeks were already noted on AEP along with other more academic technology explorations.



Update: Todd Kopriva reminds us that if "you're thinking about making the move from After Effects CS3 to After Effects CS5, don't forget about this other great stuff that comes along" from CS4.

Adobe: deactivation limit no longer enforced

via Mylenium, Adobe is Removing their Deactivation Limit:

"The deactivation limit has caused numerous problems and I'm very happy to see it go. As stated above, we should go live on the a new activation server implementation on January 15th that completely removes the deactivation limit. Although deactivation is still necessary (which causes some other problems), there should no longer be any limit to the number of deactivations.

... Note that this affects software as far back as Adobe Creative Suite 3 and Acrobat 8."

Adobe Systems to cut jobs 9%

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Adobe Systems is planning to cut 680 jobs, about 9% of the workforce. This follows a 10% cut last December.

Later, the Merc continued: 'After announcing an earlier round of 600 layoffs last December, Adobe said in June that it had added back 264 jobs, mostly in what it called "lower-cost geographies." Adobe said its new round of layoffs will help the company align spending with its overall financial plan for 2010. While Adobe has remained profitable through the recession, analysts who follow the company said the cuts are aimed at boosting profit margins after a generally lackluster year.'

Update: Look cool without breaking the bank with last year's "The Plabt Abides" t-shirt designed by Stu Maschwitz. "Plabt" was an e-mail typo that became a term of endearment.

Also, check out Motionwork's post CoSA Lives:

"Trish Meyer has kindly granted Motionworks permission to post the Story of CoSA – the original company behind After Effects. Written by After Effects team member, Dave Simons, the article was originally published in Creating Motion Graphics Volume 3 (Part 2), and gives a wonderful insight into the early days of After Effects and the team behind it." The PDF is at Motionworks.

Flash CS5 to build native iPhone apps

John Nack summarizes the announcement and links to more in Use Flash to build native iPhone apps.

There a video showing off some of this on Adobe Labs -- and some Techmeme clusters for the wrinkles.

Adobe demos nVidia CUDA acceleration for compression and RED

fxguidetv #068 features part of an Adobe tech demo of nVidia acceleration of RED video files from an IBC 2009 recap from Amsterdam (along with news from davinci-Blackmagic, Eyeon, Avid, Nuke, etc).

The Adobe demos were at the nVidia booth showing technology using nVidia's CUDA architecture, and showed only what looked like filters in Premiere that accelerated playback of with multiple transform, blur, and color correction filters. Performance so far is playback up to 5 RED RAW clips with 8-12 filters.

We might be hearing more about this and more from nVidia's GPU Tecnology Conference starting today in San Jose. Among the interesting talks is a Keynote with Richard Kerris of Lucasfilm who is to "provide a glimpse of what’s on the horizon for GPU’s in future and how it will impact filmmaking."

A revised Adobe TV

The "new and improved" Adobe TV is now live in English, and it is faster. But the forced commercials are still there and it could be me, but many web videos seem to suffer from AV sync issues. And it's odd that there are no poster frames on embeds.

But wait, there's more (and not so essential):

2009 Creative Suite Developer Summit

A 2009 Creative Suite Developer Summit is being held by Adobe in Seattle this week, and some presentations will be online too. This is a developer summit (with some boring code talk), but it might be interesting for some users to peek in on sessions.

Adobe NAB tidbits: TV, Story, Strobe

FreshDV has video demos of both Adobe Story and Adobe’s step to integrate Flash into TVs and set-top boxes and bring web video into living rooms. Zatz Not Funny! says "Flash on a set-top runs surprisingly well - so smooth you can’t tell the difference between it and traditional QAM video delivery." You can see for yourself at FreshDV.

Beet.TV notes other big news from Adobe -- Strobe -- the new video framework for building online video players. Of course back-end tools and the ability to play on TV could be an attractive-enough basis to create a standard. Probably not unrelated is news from NewTeeVee of the end of content syndication for downloadable media in Adobe Media Player. Hopefully Adobe will redo AMPs crippled UI to match or beat QuickTime Player, in addition developing of metadata and the backend. Here are video interviews from Beet.TV on Flash TV, Strobe, & partners:

MAX channel on Adobe TV

Adobe TV added a MAX channel where some MAX 2008 (San Francisco) presentations can be viewed. There's a video on Flash, After Effect & InDesign, a Flash Video Roadmap, and a couple of videos on a new app named Adobe Catalyst ("Thermo"). While the presentations aren't oriented to the AE-centric, interactive, vectors, cross-media workflow, and cross-media advertising is increasingly important to everyone except those few exclusively in the pixel-pushing business.

Layoffs at Adobe

Adobe is trimming it's staff 10% or so. The earnings didn't seem too bad; the stock price rose on the news. There's a press release and initial reports at TUAW , j/d's twitter list, and Techmeme. "Yikes" was a comment that resonated here, even if favored teams are not effected.

Update: Mike Seymour at Fxguide does a quick survey of the landscape in melt down.

AE Help on the way

Some may say that too much of everything is just enough, but in Help systems too much information can't help in time. Chris and Trish Meyer has some suggestions to avoid information anxiety in their PVC article Too Much of a Good Thing: How you can help improve Adobe’s Help.

One way Adobe is improving Help is with Todd Kopriva's initiative to add more hyper to AE Help's hyperlinks by collecting "links to online resources that describe how to accomplish certain large goals in After Effects." Here's a summary from a new section of After Effects Help on the Web, "Specific workflows in After Effects:"

Most sections of this document are organized according to general tasks that you can perform with After Effects. However, many questions are more focused on a specific end result rather than a specific task. For example, rather than wanting to know how to apply an effect to a layer and blend that layer with other layers, you may want to know how to make fire, smoke, clouds, or a tornado. This section is intended as a repository for links to resources that answer those specific, goal-focused questions.

If you add comments to this section that point to additional resources of this kind, the section will grow to be more useful and more complete.

Tutorial authors themselves could lead the charge by adding task-based links with appropriate keywords so that users can find actual solutions faster, even if there's a charge for the tutorial. Thumbnails and presets linkages would be nice too.

One of Todd's colleagues, Steve Muratore, is trying something similar in Premiere Pro Help with "Creating common effects."

Still, everything can't be predigested. Deep thought is still needed, because not even with every popular resource can you do more than grok 18% gray unless you understand fractional exponents -- though there's even help on that -- see What is Gamma, Anyway? by Mark Christiansen.

By the way, the pictures here are from Adobe Books, an independent bookstore with a small gallery in San Francisco's Mission District, which became an art installation (see a KQED Spark segment). If you're coming from another place be sure to check out the acclaimed but crowded Tartine Bakery just down Guerrero Street near Delfina and Bi-Rite grocery, and not far from Paxton Gate.

Update: Steve Muratore, Premiere Pro Help lead, notes in comments that there are basic conditions for posting to Help; Todd Kopriva mentioned other aspects of submissions earlier, including some mysterious brownie points.

Update 2: Asking Adobe for information design enhancement for Help and Support search results isn't totally out there. In November 2008, there was an Adobe project called Zoetrope, an "intuitive application" for grabbing hold of the fleeting Web and storing historical sites that users can easily search. For details see, Science Daily's "Pinning Down The Fleeting Internet: Web Crawler Archives Historical Data For Easy Searching."

Update 3: Todd Kopriva looks at moderators for After Effects Community Help, and at comments in general and "Community Help points."

Adobe's Office 2.0 Mashup

Genesis is Adobe's code name of a collaborative mashup client project, based on Adobe AIR and focused on the needs of knowledge workers in "the enterprise." It seems like Genesis will push out the directions taken by Photoshop.com, Acrobat.com, and Adobe Buzzword in creating personal, shareable, and collaborative workspaces and visualizations for business projects. Here's the Adobe Genesis Unveiling at the recent Office 2.0 conference.

"Dear Adobe..." gripe site

John Nack discussed Dear Adobe, an alternative to Adobe's Feature Request/Bug Report and Apple's cone of silence.

Dear Adobe is "a site devoted to rants & raves (but mostly rants) directed at the Big Red A. You can 'Submit Your Gripe' and vote others' contributions up or down. Although much of this stuff is hard to hear (in part because some of it echoes what's said privately at Adobe), the site is a valuable exercise. It has driven lots of conversation here: I count 30+ emails from yesterday alone, and that was just among Photoshop team members."

Adobe TV is expanding

Bob Donlon is back as the General Manager/Executive Producer of the expanding Adobe TV. His blog is now called Bob Donlon’s Adobe TV Blog, which has recently been noting news series like The Creatives and Flash in a Flash.

Red R3D support soon in AE & Pr CS3

Yesterday's news... on the RED forum by Jim Jannard, founder and backer of the RED Digital Cinema:

"Within a week, RED R3D files will open natively in CS3 Premiere Pro and After Effects."

This effort is led by RED and it's not known how the current Premiere width limit of 4096 pixels will be handled before the next Adobe release. Some CS4 apps are already on Adobe Labs, so the next versions of AE & Pr are not that far off.

If you're in San Francisco on August 5, the Digital Cinema Society Northern California Chapter examines workflows for both the Sony XDCAM EX and RED One Cameras. Adobe will present their native XDCAM EX (and presumably RED) editing workflow using Production Premium software and give the latest details on their Cinema DNG initiative. Other featured presenters include Adam Wilt and Art Adams who will share some of their findings after rigorous tests of these cameras and workflows.

The group plans to meet at Adobe in San Francisco; send the required RSVP to Trudi@DigitalCinemaSociety.org.