Kevin Goldsmith

September 21, 2007

See you at MAX!

The AIF team is having a coming out party at MAX and all of you are invited! Bob Archer and I will be speaking on Wednesday on from 3pm to 4pm.

Image and Video Processing using Adobe Image Foundation's Toolkit for Flash

Kind of a boring title, but we're engineers, and I promise the talk will be pretty exciting. Especially after you see the Keynote presentations...

"Discover a new language for image and video processing (developed by Adobe Image Foundation) that will soon be available on Adobe Labs. In this session, we will demonstrate tools for writing and testing the language, explain how to write efficient algorithms, and share examples of the possibilities for development. We'll also show how these tools were used to create some of the video processing effects shipping in Adobe After Effects CS3."

I want to talk more, but I don't want to ruin the surprises that we have in store. If you are at MAX, come by and say "Hi!" I'll be around all 3 days, there is plenty of stuff for me to see too! Also, I grew up in Chicago, so I can tell you where to get the good pizza and char dogs.

March 13, 2007

One of the things that I find fun and yet frustrating...

is reading the news sites or blogs where somebody mentions an Adobe product that I have some involvement with. Especially those products who haven't been released yet. It's fun to see how excited people are for the stuff we are working on. It is also painful to see how wrong the speculation is or how incorrect the rumours are. I correct the things I can (the ones that are actually public) and I bite my tongue on the others (those will be public soon enough). Either way, it is just cool to see that people are interested in what Adobe is doing. A lot more fun than the kind of things I used to hear about my company's products in my last job (starts with an M and ends with a T...)

Ok. one dish. Every "leaked" code name I've seen for After Effects is wrong. Those guys are waaaay more creative in their codenames than any of y'all give them credit for.

February 26, 2007

Hey, where'd the comments go?

Sorry folks, I'm getting tons of comment spam and it is taking way too long for me to sort it out everyday. I'll figure something out eventually, but for the moment, I think you'd rather have me improving the products you use rather than making sure you don't have to see spam in my comments.

January 05, 2007

I'm very excited...

That we've finally announced the new production studio.

Why am I excited? There are two reasons: as a mac user at home, I'm overjoyed that I'll now have a much more seamless solution between video editing, effects, DVD authoring and Flash; and as a Adobe employee, my new team contributed a lot to this release, but I haven't been able to blog about it at all until now.

I still can't talk too much about the work that we're doing, but soon I'll be able to give you a lot more info.

(updated: fixed spelling mistake)

March 28, 2006

Catching up

Well, I broke one of the cardinal rules of blogging, which was to let my blog lie fallow for a while. As I said in one of the last posts, I've moved onto a new project. It's keeping me pretty busy and also we're keeping it mostly under wraps for the moment. Those two things will tend to cut down on one's blogging output.

I did want to do a quick post because my team has some open jobs. Reading these descriptions will give you an inkling about what the project is about. I think these are both marked San Jose, but I know that they are both open for Seattle too...

if you go to http://cooljobs.adobe.com, there are listings for a Senior Computer Scientist (Job ID:JH020603) and Quality Lead Engineer (Job ID:JH020602). These are both on my team.

Also, I wanted to post because I'm going on an extended vacation tomorrow and I won't be posting until at least May. It's long overdue for me. You can imagine that shipping code in Photoshop Elements 3, Creative Suite 2, the Production Suite, Photoshop Elements 4, and Premiere Elements 2 and then starting a brand new project doesn't leave a lot of time for R&R. For the next month if any Adobe users in France could take it easy on any Americans stammering their way through your language it would be most appreciated.

We (Adobe) have been the subject of a lot of speculation and suspicion around the PPC->Intel OS X switch. I've been delaying posting about it, because I thought that it fell into a corporate blogging gray area. I'm really glad that Scott Beyer has addressed it. I know that we want to be delivering universal binaries, I know that Apple wants us to be delivering universal binaries and we all know that our customers want us to be delivering universal binaries. The problem is that this has turned out to be a lot harder than anyone anticipated. Even many Apple products are facing issues. We'll get them to you as soon as we can, we promise!

Au Revoir for now!

November 11, 2005

Hey all, I'm still here

Sorry for the no-posting. I've been pretty busy working on something I can't quite talk about right now... I should be able to talk about it very soon though, so watch this space!

It is always difficult for me to know what to post to an official "corporate" blog. While you wouldn't know it from my postings on adobe.com, I have over-blog-itis. I have three personal blogs, this blog and an internal Adobe blog as well. It gets really hard to know which blog post goes where. For the moment, I'm trying to restrict myself to talking about Help Center and tips on other Adobe products here, but that is getting a bit restrictive, so I'm going to maybe incorporate some other topics here as well. That way I can get at least a post a week up.

I'm also curious to find out what people want to know about. I can talk about working at Adobe, software deveopment, C++, Help Center (of course), whatever ya want to know. This blog, for me, is all about establishing a dialog with our customers, so let me know what you want to know... I can't talk about everything I'm working on, because some of it definitely falls into the "if I tell you, I'll have to kill you" territory, but I'll do my best to answer what I can.

October 18, 2005

Adobe and the long tail

I've been thinking a lot lately about the DIY movement and its current nickname, "The Long Tail." The long tail describes a movement where through electronic publishing and distribution small scale content creators can find customers and support themselves. Wired had a nice article about this last year.

As it relates to this venue, I've been wondering what Adobe can do to help independent content producers (or artists in non-marketing speak) monetize their work. I think that it is pretty safe to say that our tools are behind a lot of the digital content that independants are creating. I'm not talking about creating a marketplace or something like that. I'm talking about hooking the photoshop wiz up with the on-demand t-shirt printing, selling and mailing company. I'm talking about hooking up the video artist with the on-demand DVD burning, selling and mailing company.

Some of this stuff would be very simple to do. How hard would it be for Zazzle or Cafe Press to write a Photoshop or InDesign plug-in so you could output straight to their sites and preview on a t-shirt?

I'm being a bit deliberately vaugue on this because I'm interested in hearing what our customers think about this. Are you doing something like this and is there something that we could do to help out?

October 11, 2005

Creating a disaster file

I've been thinking lately about creating a secure, but accessible, digital store for my family's important data.

I currently do all the sensible things: frequent backups, keeping backups in multiple locations, etc... but I was wondering what would happen if we were on vacation and my wallet got stolen.

There have been a lot of articles about this since the Katrina and Rita disasters. A common suggestion is to use a flash drive with a security mechanism. You could carry this drive around with you always. I thought that this was a good plan, but I was concerned that I would lose the flash drive or that it wouldn't work on a linux PC running in an internet cafe somewhere.

Then I realized that there might be a better way.

Here is what I'm going to do:
I'm going to create a file with my account numbers, emergency contact info and anything else I might need to have if Mt Ranier blows or my wallet gets stolen in Prague. Then, I'll encrypt and password protect it using PDF Security features. Rather than carrying it around with me, I can stash it on a secure non-linked place on my web server or in my internet mail account and be able to grab it from anywhere there is an internet connection onto any platform or device that supports PDF 5.0 (of which there are zillions).

This actually seems like the best plan, I'm surprised I didn't think of it earlier.

October 07, 2005

Adobe's first podcast!

I'm a big fan of podcasts. I've been listening to them since there were only a handful. One of the things that I find difficult though is that many of the people new to audio recording don't understand how to make their podcasts sound better. So I decided to do a little podcast showing you how to use Audition to make your podcasts sound better. So here is the podcast. You can listen to it while refering to the screenshots below. I'm also enclosing a little Audition 1.5 script file that I used to clean up parts of my podcast. You should tweak this script so that it sounds better for your own recordings.

[download podcast] [download script file]

here are the screenshots:

This is my original recording.

Here is after the initial edit.

After the next edit

After the normalization step.

The compression settings

After the compression step

Next step

Parametric EQ settings

Post EQ

Hiss eliminator

The Final waveform!

So, I hope you liked it. There are a couple things I'd change. Using my laptop microphone really made my Ss sound sibilant. I tried to compensate by using Audition's frequency analyzer to figure out the frequency and the graphic EQ to cut it a bit, but it still sounds sibilant in a few places.

I'd be really interested to see what anyone reading this likes to use for a similar situation. Add a comment about your techniques. You'll notice that my script is actually different from what I described. In the script, I compress, remove hiss, EQ and then normalize.

September 16, 2005

Howdy

Hello all! I'm delighted to round out the first dozen of the public Adobe blogs. I'm a software developer in Adobe's Core Technologies team working in the Center Of The Universe (also known as the neighborhood of Fremont in Seattle, Washington).

CoreTech (as we call it) is responsible for some of your favorite stuff in your favorite Adobe products. We make sure that colors map correctly in Photoshop and that your separations print well in InDesign.

Since joining Adobe last year, I've mostly been working on Adobe Help Center which made its debut in Photoshop Elements 3. I'm working on some other new technologies as well, but they are still super secret...

With my Adobe blog, I'm hoping to cover a wide range of issues. I plan to talk about technology (especially Adobe Technology), the internet, cross platform software development and I'll probably talk a bit about Help Center as well.

More next week...