Collaborate Almost Everywhere with Adobe Anywhere

Okay, so my title's a little unfair: Adobe's new "collaborative workflow platform" may not work literally everywhere, but it will work anywhere there's WiFi or an ethernet hook-up. Whether you're a long-time Adobe advocate or a latter-day convert to Premiere Pro, Adobe Anywhere could be making your life just that much easier down the line, especially if you've ever manually had to manage media over the internet and across several parties. Click through for details.

As our favorite Adobe staff members point out, aside from the accessibility and security of the cloud-based system, there are a few other benefits:

• Compatibility with Adobe Prelude, Premiere Pro, and After Effects
• Full-integration means Anywhere mostly just functions in the background, no learning curve required
• Data is remotely located, so no user is dependent on another, say, to act as a media server
• All changes users make are universal and automatic once 'shared,' so no XMLs or media need be manually transferred back and forth
• Dedicated servers chew data themselves and perform compositing live, potentially meaning more powerful editing can be done on weaker client machines
• Something called the Mercury Streaming Engine optimizes quality against available bandwidth to intelligently bring you real-time HD -- scrubbing and all -- no proxy files necessary
• And, with a strangely almost-open-source mentality, Adobe points out the ability to "Build teams on talent, not location."

Apparently Adobe's hoping to build anticipation for Anywhere early on and gradually increase exposure until its release -- which will simply be its inclusion with a future generation of the aforementioned software titles. As such, there's no definitive release date thus far. I for one think this is a pretty novel idea -- not for being ahead of the times, but actually, for being caught up to them. By now many of us are familiar with the power of the cloud, and there's a good chance you're already using it in some way commercially or privately. I'd say we're definitely ready for an industry leader like Adobe (itself being no stranger to the idea) to integrate these concepts into video workflows directly.

As Daniel McKleinfeld mentions in his Anywhere write-up at DigitalTrends, this is exactly the sort of thinking and software the future will require:

We’ll soon be in a world where a photographer can be shooting in Karachi in the morning, an assistant editor in India marks up the footage, a post house in New York cuts it, a reporter in Islamabad watches the cut and writes a voice-over which is immediately recorded by an actor in L.A. and laid onto the timeline by a sound editor in Chicago, and the whole thing is delivered to television before lunch-time.

On paper (so to speak), this workflow utopia certainly sounds great, as does Adobe Anywhere, and I have high hopes for the software and the model it represents.

Do you guys feel the same way? How do you see this software, or one like it, truly affecting your working styles in the future? What sort of problems have you had, doing in the past what Anywhere proposes to do natively? (Horror stories welcome!)

Links:

• Adobe Anywhere  -- Adobe Website
• Introducing Adobe Anywhere for Video -- AdobeTV

[via StudioDaily & DigitalTrends]