>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas,
it's the Cube!
Covering NAB 2017,
brought to you by HGST.
>> Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with The Cube,
We are getting towards the end of day three at NAB 2017,
and we've talked to a ton of people from security,
and storage, and applications,
and now we get to talk to a creator.
And really excited to have Victoria Nece on,
she's a project manager for adobe After Effects, welcome.
>> Thank you it's great to be here.
>> Absolutely, been getting a little background on you,
you were just really an animator and Adobe was
smart enough to say "Hey this girl's got her shit together,
we should bring her inside and have her help with
the team at a bigger level."
Instead of all the little things you were doing.
>> Yeah so I was a motion designer mostly for documentary
for a long time.
And I got really into writing my own scrips
and extensions and I used to say I like to make
After Effects do stuff it wasn't supposed to do,
and now it's my job to help make it do those things.
>> Okay so what are some of the new things you said
that you know, luckily we're past the official
release date,
you can actually talk about things
>> Yes.
>> So what are some of the new things?
>> Uh, so we have a great new release, just came out
last week, last Wednesday we're super proud of it,
it's available to anyone who has creative
cloud subscription.
And a big thing, and this is across After Effects
and Premier, is a new thing called the
essential graphics panel.
It allows you to make really elaborate-
anything you want to do in After Effects you can go
fully advanced motion graphics,
and then choose the properties in editor you want to
be able to change.
So I can say, I'm designing something but it's on brand,
I don't want you to change the color,
but you can change the text,
you can reposition something on the screen,
we can change the background color,
do all of those kind of things,
and I can add those controls in After Effects
and when I save those as a motion graphics template,
it gets packed up and someone can use it in Premier
and change those things live in the timeline
with no rendering, so.
>> It's really interesting just the whole collaboration,
you know, kind of aspect.
It used to be so much, you know, an individual sitting down
on their hopefully very big machine with a lot of
memory and compute, you know, working on Adobe.
But now, it's really more of a collaborative effort.
There's not a lot of people just working independantly
all by themselves on the machine.
>> True.
>> Especially with Cloud and some of these really
higher performance applications.
>> Yeah it's actually been really interesting to watch
what's happened.
We have a beta service called Team Projects
and I've been doing press demos where I'm in Seattle
and one of my colleagues is in Germany
and we're collaborating live on the same projects,
I'm on After Effects, he's in Premier,
I make a change, it shows up right in his timeline
he doesn't even have to open After Effects,
doesn't have to import anything,
and it's all really seemless.
And we've actually,
we've all been collaborating the whole time
but now you can do it without all those extra steps of
rendering, and sending a file, and downloading the file,
and importing it, and then adding it.
Now that can all just happen in one click.
>> It's like Google Docs versus Word.
>> Yeah, right.
>> Save and attach a file and send, hopefully you remember
to save the file.
>> Alright and the other thing you're really excited about
is character animator.
>> Yes.
>> So what's going on there?
>> So for people who don't know,
character animator is a new application from
the original creators of After Effects.
It's a separate application that allows you to do
real time live animation using your webcam
and your microphone and also even use a touch screen,
keyboard, mouse, basically hardware you already have,
to power a character that starts off as a Photoshop
or Illustrator file,
and character animator brings it to life.
We've seen some really amazing stuff people are
doing with it.
>> So real time live animation,
so that seems like completely impossible,
cause back in the day that's all we would hear about,
is you know you have to render render render render render
to get this animations stuff going.
But now you're saying you've got it broken down
so that we can do it live.
>> There's this great line from The Simpsons
that animation is rarely done live,
it's a terrible strain on the animators wrists,
and we're working to change that (laughs).
It's a lot of fun and also you look at the screen
and your character looks back at you,
it's this really amazing experience working in it.
And we've been working to make it easier to use,
easier to get started,
we've added workspaces so now it actually walks you through
the process of getting characters set up and rigged
and then a different space for performing.
But it's, character animation's fun.
>> And then now you're bolting that onto all these various
live video distribution services.
>> Mhm, we've added Mercury transmit support,
which means you can go out to broadcast hardware,
you can connect to absolute stream,
to Facebook live, Youtube live,
we're seeing things like Steven Colbert's The Late Show
they use character animator to do cartoon Trump
and he's improving live with a cartoon character
and it's all happening in real time.
>> (laughs) So as you look back and this is all fascinating
and it's great, now you've got the power of
the whole company to kind of make many of your visions
come true.
Where does it go next?
It just seems like the creative opportunity,
or the tools for the creator, are just exploding.
>> I think there's a lot of cool stuff we can do,
but for me one of the biggest things is
anything we can do to save people time,
and to save people doing the boring stuff,
I want to give people more space to create.
>> Right.
>> So, don't have to think about verging,
you don't have to think about all those outputs,
but all the stuff about- get that out of the way,
get the data entry out of the way so you can actually
focus on the stuff you really want to be doing.
>> And what about 360 and VR and all those
crazy new technologies which are all over these halls.
>> It's everywhere.
Premier's got some really cool stuff this release,
they've got Ambisonic audio so you can actually do
VR, 360 footage and the sound comes from the right place
in the shot as you turn your head.
>> Ambisonic v- >> Ambisonic audio.
>> Ambisonic audio.
>> So there's some really cool stuff happening there.
And then on the After Effects side we have some
amazing partners who have been doing super cool stuff
with VR, their tools are really evolving,
and it's a really nice seemless workflow working with them.
>> (laughs) So where does it go next?
>> Oof.
>> Anywhere, right? >> Anywhere really.
>> No it's just amazing how again these tools that really
put everything in the power of basically anybody's hands.
It's kind of this whole democratization theme
which we continue to hear over and over again.
>> We've really focused a lot on trying to get
just the tools you need right now to get you
most of the way there,
super simple, and then when you need to go deep,
you can go deep.
We're not limiting you to the simple tools,
but everything's right in context,
right in front of you,
the stuff you change the most is right there.
And then when you need to go in and tweak
and get to the pro level it's another step down.
And so we're trying to really build that kind of a workflow
so that you have sound and graphics and color
all right in edit and then you have the big pro apps
for when you need to do the fancy stuff.
>> The heavy lifting.
And I wonder, Victoria, you talked about the community,
cause Adobe's got a really active community,
you guys have a huge show that brings everybody together,
you obviously came out of that community
into the mothership.
How important is this, you know,
kind of an active community around the creative process,
tools you mentioned you even wrote your own scripts.
>> Mhm it's, I love the After Effects community in particular
they're my friends and a show like this,
I see people I have really great friends that
I only see once or twice a year at these kind of shows,
but it's such a great strong global community
that we stay in touch throughout the year,
and our users really drive where we're going with things.
A lot of the features in this release of After Effects,
I could tell you by name who's been asking for them
for years and who's super excited to see something in there.
>> Okay, so if I see you again in 2018 can you give us a hint
as to maybe what we'll see?
Don't get in trouble.
>> I might get in trouble.
But we've got some really cool stuff under way.
>> Alright, well we'll keep an eye,
and you guys over on the table,
you got to learn how to do this talking
creative animator thing.
I could think of some people that we might want to chin up
not the real Donald Trump,
but some other people.
(laughs)
>> Alright Victoria,
well thanks for spending a few minutes with us
and again, congrats on the new relase.
>> Thank you,
it's really great to be here.
>> Alright Victoria Nece,
I'm Jeff Rick you're watching the Cube from NAB 2017.
Thanks for watching.