Here's a modern-day post-production scenario: Start your edit on set, working with files coming straight off a camera and uploading to the cloud in the background. While driving back to the production office, get to work on breaking the footage down on your iPad. Get back to the office, fire up the edit on your desktop and knock out a few changes before sending it for approvals from the team. Head out for a meal, see approvals and tweaks come in, make the changes on your iPhone and upload directly to you YouTube without having to leave the restaurant.
Frankly, this is what many people who didn't read the press release closely thought "Adobe Creative Cloud" was going to be when it was originally released, and now it's here with Project Rush. The ability to work on an edit in the office, then make tweaks on it on the train home, then make final polishes the next morning over breakfast without having to lug hard drives and laptops around with you is something that many have wanted for a long time.
Adobe is positioning this as targeted more at social video creators who have a need to churn out a large amount of content on a short turnaround time, and the tools are built in that direction at the moment. Most people making video in any format these days feel that same time pressure and, if this tool is successful, it could evolve into having the power the rest of us need.
Every filmmaker knows the pain of having to run back to the office at 11:30 to change a title because someone else spelled something wrong, and the office is the only place that has the right typeface installed. A truly seamless cloud workflow, where edits flow between desktop and mobile platforms, is something we are desperate for. Some might argue that it's going to lead to even more work invading our home life, but we think that ship has already sailed, and we would rather do five minutes of work at home at midnight to fix someone else's error than have to go back to the post suite at midnight for the same thing.
Share directly to social from within the tool.Credit: Adobe
Right now, Project Rush is only in Beta, and the big outstanding question will obviously be how the proxy workflow handles slow internet speeds. For our readers in South Korea, Sweden and Latvia with blazing fast internet, having your source files on the cloud and editing by proxy will probably be fine, but North American internet is slow, especially in New York and Los Angeles, so we're hoping that Adobe has developed the proxy workflow such that a satisfying editing experience can be created anyway.
Adobe is also pushing a new "all-in-one" interface with all of your edit, color, audio and motion graphics tools built into one interface. While the full-fledged Premiere gains more and more functionality from Audition and After Effects, we wonder if this might be pointing towards a future release from Adobe of a single standalone app for all our video needs to compete with Final Cut Pro X and DaVinci Resolve.
For more check out Project Rush.
