Al's Blog

It’s that time of year again, when most of us in the international broadcasting community are dusting off our name badges and very soft shoes, and getting ready to flock to Amsterdam for IBC.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been – almost as if the city in some way affects my memory – but it’s always a great place to catch up with old friends and see how this crazy industry of ours is developing and changing.

This year, Adobe’s focus at IBC will be around demonstrating workflows with our ever-expanding ecosystem of industry technology partners. As Premiere Pro continues to make amazing progress in the Broadcast and Post-production markets, it is imperative that we work hard to ensure that it isn’t just a great NLE in its own right, but a dependable ‘workflow citizen’.

At Adobe, we’ve always been very good at building tight integration between our applications, and Premiere Pro is a great example. Our ‘plan to playback’ philosophy is all about smooth, easy workflows between applications. You can start with a script in Adobe Story, import it into Premiere Pro and use it as metadata, or to derive a time-accurate speech track to edit to. You can import Photoshop and Illustrator documents and maintain critical elements like layers and blend modes. You can move freely between Premiere, After Effects and Encore via Dynamic Link. You can send your whole sequence to Audition for audio finessing, and you can drag-drop sequences from Premiere Pro right into Adobe Media Encoder for final output.

But arguably more important in broadcast workflows is integration outside of our own boxes. Premiere needs to play nicely with asset management systems, with SANs, with other NLEs and DAWs, with finishing tools, with play-out systems. So over the past few releases, we have made (and continue to strive to make) significant improvements in how our NLE interacts with the outside world. We now offer import and export of the Final Cut XML, which not only brings us interoperability with Final Cut Pro 7 and earlier, but due to its wide adoption within the industry, many other platforms and applications too. We have some support for AAF, and in our recent 5.5 release, we improved our OMF export capabilities, for smooth workflows with audio apps like Avid Pro Tools and Merging’s Pyramix. Also, for the seemingly ever-increasing number of developers who want to support our platform, we have a freely available SDK, which we plan to continue improving and embellishing.

I can’t say much yet about exactly who you’re going to see us partnering with at IBC, but we’re all really excited about it. As we continue to strive to make our applications indispensable tools for creative professionals, we’ll also be striving to expand this partner ecosystem, and offer customers the integration they need to use the tools they love. See you in Amsterdam.