The Video Road

It’s been several months since I’ve posted anything here. Part of that has been because of my constant time on new Facebook groups, on Twitter, and elsewhere. The other major change in my life is definitely part of the Video Road. I’m now stationed in the Adobe Singapore office.

Why Singapore? Well, to answer that, I have to first answer the question, “Why Asia in general?” The truth is that I’ve always found Asia to be one of the most energetic and dynamic parts of the world. This region is growing so rapidly, and the Adobe video business is really riding that wave over here. We are seeing a big growth in areas like broadcast worldwide, but the potential for growth in the next couple of years here in Asia-Pacific (or APAC) is huge, and I want to help it however I can. Earlier this year, I got the opportunity to come back to the region on a video tour, and it reminded me how much I’ve missed the area. Last year was a domestic-only travel year, and while I loved the Hollywood visits, my heart missed the world traveling; the world exposure to different production worlds, different challenges, etc.

Out of all of Asia, Singapore is the most cosmopolitan city. There’s a little bit of everything here. One thing my world travels has taught me is that America is the biggest exporter of chain branding, especially for restaurants. You name it, and we have it here. (It’s also a place for American chains that can’t survive in the USA – read this article to see more.) Still, the culinary adventures are numerous. 2 highlights so far – getting the kids to try Century Eggs one night (which I love) and to try the King of Fruit, Durian, the next. (not as well received.) The culture here is definitely the most “western” of the large Asian cities, but there’s still a wonderful blending of cultures. It does remind me a lot of San Francisco without the hills – a big city with a lot of diversity, but with a unified branding and identity.

It’s all still so new here – my furniture hasn’t even arrived, and I’m meeting with clients and planning travel in the region. The family is still getting used to it all. Most of my family had never left the USA before, so this was quite the adventure for them. I still have to get my daughter to remember to look right when crossing the street (instead of left like back home.) The humidity is really foreign to me, having grown up in the arid Sacramento valley. My body is still adjusting to that.

People keep asking me how long I will be here – although this is a 2-year contract, I’m treating it for the time being as a permanent relocation. I can’t predict the market in 2 years, but I love the location, the people, the culture, and well, everything about Singapore so far. Some of the other expats that live here came over on even shorter contracts, and just never left. So, we will see what the future holds.

HELLO SINGAPORE!!

Posted by Karl Soule at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Thanks to everyone I met last week in Brazil! Answers to some of your questions are forthcoming!

Posted by Karl Soule at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey Everyone,

NAB Madness is upon us!

Here’s a schedule of where I’ll be presenting and when:

Monday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am – Accelerated Tapeless Workflows: Go from Shoot to Edit Faster in Premiere Pro CS4
9:30am – Everyday Timesavers: Edit Faster with the Top Timesaving Features in CS4 Production Premium
11:00am – The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm – Technology Sneak Peeks: See What’s Coming in Adobe Creative Software

(In the FCP SuperBooth)
5:00pm – Integrating Adobe Production Premium into your FCP Workflow

Tuesday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am – Life without Walls: Open Workflows with Avid and Apple
9:30am – Everyday Timesavers: Edit Faster with the Top Timesaving Features in CS4 Production Premium
11:00am – The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm – Technology Sneak Peeks: See What’s Coming in Adobe Creative Software

Wednesday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am – Accelerated Tapeless Workflows: Go from Shoot to Edit Faster in Premiere Pro CS4
11:00am – The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm – Technology Sneak Peeks: See What’s Coming in Adobe Creative Software

(In the FCP SuperBooth)
3:20pm – Integrating Adobe Production Premium into your FCP Workflow

I’ll also be presenting at the RED Supermeet Wednesday night.

Thursday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am – Life without Walls: Open Workflows with Avid and Apple
11:00am – The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm – Technology Sneak Peeks: See What’s Coming in Adobe Creative Software

I’ll also be hanging out at the pods around the back of the Adobe theatre each afternoon, so come by and say hi!

Posted by Karl Soule at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently came back straight from Moscow, and went down into the studio to record some new episodes of Short & Suite for AdobeTV.

By the way, AdobeTV is now 1 year old! 1 year ago last week, Adobe launched the AdobeTV site with 210 videos. Today, Adobe TV has almost 3,000 videos, including offerings in English, German, Japanese and French. The content is growing weekly, and all of the evangelists just wrapped up shooting new episodes in the brand-new studio in San Francisco.

This week is a prep week for NAB, which will be action-packed. In addition to many presentations in the Adobe Theatre, I’ll also be attending user group meetings for FCP and RED users, presenting in the FCP SuperBooth, and also covering a couple of Adobe-specific user group meetings. I’ll be posting a full schedule later in the week.

On a completely unrelated note, I ordered a gift for my friend and coworker, Jason Levine, way back in December. It was backordered until very recently, and now it’s sitting on my desk. I’m going to present it to him at NAB, but I thought I’d have some fun in the meantime seeing if he can guess what it is. Here’s one of the very blurry photos I’ve sent Jay over the past couple of weeks:

Any guesses?

Posted by Karl Soule at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to the team in Moscow, we had a spectacular event, with over 1200 people attending. The crowd was super energized, and I am very much looking forward to coming back in the future!

I usually shoot a lot of video on my travels, but I rarely have enough time to get anything produced before I’m off to the next event. This time, I made the time on the flight back. This edit is VERY rough, and I wanted to insert some of the great photos that were taken into it. This was shot on my HV-30, all handheld (it really shows – sorry for all the shakycam!) and captured into Premiere Pro as a single clip, which I then created a massive amount of subclips from. In CS4, subclips perform just great, plus I added metadata to each of the subclips, so my media can be organized by location, content (buildings, people, etc.)

Here’s the video:

You’ll see Rufus, Paul, and myself, plus Roman and Olga from the local office. Both Roman and Olga took personal time to show us around Moscow, each on different days. Thanks again, Roman & Olga!

The music track used is “As the Rush Comes” by a group called Motorcycle. Copyright by Armada Music, and the track is available for purchase and download here: http://www.armadadownloads.com/

Posted by Karl Soule at 5:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I made a startling discovery tonight – the AVI files that my little still camera shoots are NOT readable by the Adobe Media Encoder on the Mac. Solution? Use Photoshop! Using the new Adjustments panel, I also quickly added a Curves preset (increase Contrast) and used a blue filter to lessen the sodium yellow caused by the lamps. Here’s the result:

I stood in the center of Red Square, and shot this video as the Kremlin Clock on Spasskaya Tower struck 8pm. the video starts with Spasskaya Tower, shows the walls of the Kremlin, shows Lenin’s tomb (with Roman waving at the camera,) the Iberian Gate and Chapel (with Slava waving,) the GUM department store all lit up, and then St Basil’s Cathedral.

Thanks for the comments, everyone! Looking forward tot he event Friday!

Posted by Karl Soule at 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s a balmy 32 degrees F (0C) here in Moscow. It actually feels warmer. I was braced for really cold conditions, but this feels warmer than some days in the Sierras skiing back home. Moscow has a reputation for incredibly cold conditions in the winter, and most of the locals are commenting on how this almost feels like an “early spring.”

The ground is covered in what’s called “Moscow Cocktail,” which is a gray slushy mixture of snow, ice, water, and road salts. It’s EVERYWHERE. You can’t avoid it when walking down the streets. I step carefully.

In the Adobe office, I’m sitting next to a map of the entire Russian federation. This is the first time I’ve seen a Russia-centric map. Globes and world maps don’t do justice to the size of this country. It just amazes me. Slava, the sole Sales guy here, says it takes 8 hours to get from Moscow to the Eastern shores. That’s 2 weeks by train. In the US, I’ve driven Coast-to-coast in under 52 hours before (not recommended, but it’s possible.)

Today is a prep day for me, along with the possibility of meeting with a high-end broadcaster here. Tomorrow, Rufus and Paul will be joining me here to brief our partners on CS4, and Friday is the Creative Futures event. The early attendance numbers for the event on Friday are astounding – 3,000 people have registered! This is the first time for an event like this in Moscow, so that’s a HUGE number! If you’re reading this in the Moscow area, come on out and say hi.

Posted by Karl Soule at 3:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Overall, I’ve had a FANTASTIC weekend in Prague. This is the first time visiting the city, and even though it’s really cold, I’ve enjoyed everything – the food, the people, just the overall atmosphere. It’s such a beautiful city.

Today, I’ve been sequestered in my hotel room prepping some custom content for this week’s road tour through Bratislava (on Tuesday) Prague (on Wednesday) and Warsaw (on Thursday). I’ll be covering a little of everything Production Premium related each day over a 5 hour period. If you are in the area, definitely stop in and say hi.

For those who follow me on Twitter (KarlSoule) you’ll know that I’ve had some issues with my hotel room chair. Something I’ve never been able to understand is why hotel chairs are most often chosen for style over comfort. Case in point:

I’ve been sitting on this piece of lucite for the past 6 hours, off and on, and I officially declare it is the MOST UNCOMFORTABLE CHAIR EVER!!

With that rant done, I’m back to work. See you later in the week.

Posted by Karl Soule at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thanks to everyone this week for all the love at Broadcast Video Expo! Our Adobe theatre was absolutely PACKED the entire show, with lots of interest in CS4. Even in the Panasonic booth, as soon as I began demoing our P2 workflow, the theatre was left with standing room only. Just a phenomenal show. I’m still waiting to see final attendance numbers, but this show had the floor traffic of shows of yore – people packed in the aisles.

I’ll leave you with one pic of the Adobe Theatre, showing my friend Angie Taylor in mid-demo. Again, every seat full, people sitting on the floor, and standing 4-deep in the aisles:

Headed to Prague as I type this – really looking forward to my first visit in Eastern Europe!

Posted by Karl Soule at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m safely in my hotel room on the West side of London. I’ll be at Earl’s Court 2 this Tuesday – Thursday doing a variety of presentations. If you’re in the area, please say hi.

Each Day:

10:15am – See an overview of CS4 Production Premium at the Dreamtek booth.

1:45pm – 2:30pm – See P2 Workflow with CS4 Production Premium in the Panasonic booth.

4:15pm – See an overview of CS4 Production Premium at the Dreamtek booth. (Not happening Thursday – show closes early.)

Wednesday:

11:30am – The CinemaDNG Initiative: Find out about Adobe’s mission to bring RAW workflows into the video space.

For the Production Premium sessions, I do take requests, if there’s something specific you’d like to see.

Posted by Karl Soule at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)