Speaker 0 00:00:08 This is the workflow show media production, technology stories, discussions about development, deployment, and maintenance of secure media solutions. And of course, workflow therapy. When you find your creativity is blocked by your technology challenges. I'm Jason Whetstone, senior workflow, engineer and developer for Chesapeake systems. And I'm Ben Kilburg senior solutions architect. It just speaks systems today on the show, we'll be discussing a new partner certification program. That's recently come online with Adobe, the Adobe certified service partner or ACE S P program. Jessa was one of the first organizations in the U S to receive a ESP certification. We've welcomed Dave Helmsley back to the show, as well as Michael gambit, head of the AC ESP program at Adobe. We'll talk to Dave and Michael about what the certification means in our industry and criteria. The certification program entails a quick reminder though, if you've got a fever, the only prescription is your subscription to the workflow show. If you have suggestions for guests or episode topics,
[email protected] is our email address. And now onto our discussion with Dave and Michael. All right. I would like to welcome Michael Gambon and David <inaudible> to our discussion today. David, why don't you intro us a little bit and talk what, what your team does for Adobe?
Speaker 1 00:01:28 That's great. Jason, thanks. So, uh, Michael and I are part of a worldwide strategy development, uh, team, a strapped dev team, and really that it's a biz dev team. Um, you know, Michael and I have, uh, you know, many, many years decades, uh, at Adobe, uh, working specifically in the, in the video space. And certainly I've worked with Chesa for, I don't know, probably close to 30 years now. I think we have come to a point. I think we can all agree, even, especially with COVID where things are starting to get a bit more specialized. There's just a lot of information out there. And, you know, we've got things that we need to sort of get in front of customers, um, and, and talk to partners and our team sort of wrangles a lot of that information. We have to be on top of the technology.
Speaker 1 00:02:16 So a lot of people already have creative cloud. We just need to ensure that they, that they keep using it. They, they, they want to keep using it. And in particular, you know, for us, it's, it's all about the, the, the video products. And I think we've all seen with COVID what's happened over the, over the past a year. I mean, there's a lot of money being redirected budget wise for some of the enterprises for, for how to make this technology work for them. Right? And so you guys have had to learn new tech. We've had to learn new tech and, you know, Michael has taken on this opportunity, uh, for our team to manage a, a select group of companies, um, that we're calling service providers. And it's going to be a very small amount of worldwide. Our team by the way is only about 15 people worldwide. Michael pretty much manages all of the, uh, the, the Germany area and some surrounding countries. Uh, I, you guys have known me for north and south America, uh, for years, all of this gets down to where's the technology, and right now, who can we work with to help deliver that to the customer? So let me just turn it over to Michael for a second, cause I'm sure he's got a, got a few words for what this new program that we're kicking off means to him.
Speaker 2 00:03:31 Thanks Dave. We are to deal. We, we try to deliver the best user experience for credits, and that really means that we are focused on, on this part and to doing this past, we started from the beginning on this journey that we partnered with a technology partners, and that really worked very well, but something that was always missing is what I call the glue. Um, which means you need a full holistic solution as a client. You need not only a storage and you need not only a ma'am, you need a solution, a system. And we are at Adobe, always try to engage with the clients in the best possible way. We are trying to capture all the needs, and there was always this need of what I call it. One services, something that they want to have someone who's responsible for, maybe the whole installation, someone who is helping, when it's outside of premier pro someone who is helping run, um, the storage is not doing what is expected to do.
Speaker 2 00:04:30 And this is one, this idea office service provided was starting plus. Um, the whole industry is shifting in a way which needs different ideas and a little bit thinking outside of the box, a typical, I would call a resetter the question is, is this a long-term business? And the way on how people are purchasing today is to something that is changing over time. So the idea really was to give a client a better experience and give the client the service, which is needed and helping our business partners of which is the technology partner, but also this new partner type, which we called service partner service provider, an opportunity to work with Adobe and deliver what I call them value added services to this clients. And so that's how the program was started. The idea is that these partners, service partners, they are delivering support, which often is outsourced.
Speaker 2 00:05:28 They do deliver, uh, consultants based on workflows, their experience, um, maybe training, um, a lot of knowledge, what to do. Uh, we see tons of, uh, project coming up right now, uh, and in Europe or, um, there is a need for is how can I move my operation totally in the cloud? How can I visualize everything? How can I run my operation Asher? Or how can I run it in AWS? And that is something that, um, service partners, so doing and last but not least. And I think it's important that we have to three, really the three areas is integration. There's nothing stronger than a custom built workflow for a client, which is building every assistant process for arrows. If it's just one button, which is making the right export setting to the right destination, which trigger the right system for a play out or to upload to social, that is something which is possible with Adobe bod. You need to have some ex uh, expertise around us. And that's why these three areas are important to deliver when you're a service provider.
Speaker 1 00:06:34 Yeah, and I, I think it's, it's important, um, Michael, to add, um, especially for the listening audience, that a lot of what Michael talked about, and there was a lot, a lot packed in there. This is part of the criteria, um, that you guys were selected out of a lot of people. And, and thank you by the way for accepting. Cause there was some criteria and work, uh, some exams and testing and certifications to be done on your side. Um, and again, and we've only got three people in north America or threshold say three companies in north America that have qualified for this, uh, to this selective. Great. How are we a selecting
Speaker 2 00:07:09 Partners? When we started the idea, we worked with, uh, a few people on, we, we really limited us to, uh, Germany and the UK. And then we discuss with them, how can these, this program be successful for the client and for the partners. And that really led to a decision on what are the requirements to join the program and the requirements pretty high. So there's a lot of proven ability. You need to prove that you're able to deliver the support, which means you need to have a support ticket system. You need to have the numbers of support engineers. You need to have a visualized environment for a software testing. You need to have a sandbox system, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, it's kind of a compelling thing to go there. Um, but it is worth because you add a lot of value to the client then. And I think that is very important. Uh, we're glad that you're here and we are super glad and excited that we can talk about this. Yeah. We're glad to
Speaker 1 00:08:04 Be here. One of the examples at its simplest form for what, from Michael San is what system do I need, right? You guys get that every day and it's not a matter of you guys just saying, oh, well, you know, you can do this on a four core or an eight core or whatever. It's you have to fundamentally understand how premiere and after effects work. You guys are now in the driver's seat connected to Adobe engineering, which was really the point and part of this club. And this was something Michael was really pushing on as well as we need to bring these, these companies in, to like our team almost an extended one and say, well, look, this is why premiere works this way. And if you put three GPU's in it, why doesn't it scale linearly while it's like it won't because of acts, this is, this is the rendering order and how things happen.
Speaker 1 00:08:52 So that really puts you in Chesapeake in a much better driver's seat for the customer at a point of knowledge, to say, I mean, you're not exactly Adobe engineering. You're about for them, you're as close as they're going to get because you're directly connected. So I think it's important to let them know what the program represents and what we're offering. Um, certainly to the, to the, to the people that we bring on board. And I think it really, really is unique because a lot of companies don't really get you involved at that level to sort of say, well, this is why you need eight core, and this is why you need this or that. Um, because the program fundamentally, uh, looks at data and codecs this way. Sure.
Speaker 0 00:09:31 I mean, I would, I would submit that this kind of a partnership relationship certification processes a little bit more akin to a relationship that we're used to having with some of our partners that developing ma'ams. We have sort of a seat at the table, I would say, and in the feature development and the bug fixes and things like that, uh, with the engineers and with the product team at those organizations. So this is great. I mean, this really puts partners in a situation where they can be at that table. I was one of the folks at Chesapeake who went through the training and, uh, Michael you're, right. It was a lot of work, but well worth it. There's tons of useful information there. And I'm certainly no slouch in terms of understanding workflow and having been doing this for a decade or so of my life. But, uh, the level of depth that you guys put into the training materials was awesome. And I'm just looking forward to digging in even more and, um, being able to bug you on a regular basis, which is going to be fun.
Speaker 1 00:10:27 Fantastic. And technology's changing all the time, right? Like we saw these great announcements by apple. I think we're all kind of excited. I don't know what color I am Mac I'm going to get there. That's kind of hilarious
Speaker 0 00:10:38 All about the purple day, all about the purple purple, but
Speaker 1 00:10:41 The question is, do you want a yellow keyboard to go with your purple? It reminds me of the lifesaver packs that you, that you guys had the order back when, and for those people that don't know that the resellers were required to order one of every color. And that was basically a skew for them. So it's basically five or six at a time, and nobody wanted the Tangerine orange iMac, but anyway, they just with the <inaudible> and how exciting that is. And even maybe what we see with windows arm and just other technologies, you know, we're going to be optimizing and we're doing a lot of stuff right now, you know, premier pro would be, it'll be ready soon. Just kind of tidying up, um, dynamic length, the part of after effects. What does that mean? Because customers want to know do it, do I wait to buy this now? Should I look at, at a different platform? I've got budget right now, how does that tie into my, my Adobe workflow? And by the way, we haven't even gotten into where we are with ma'ams and some of the other things that, uh, that we can talk about, but just at its root level, just from the client, there's a lot that you guys are going to be required to know to give that, that right answer, right.
Speaker 0 00:11:49 This is some pretty high tech information. And it, I think it takes a special a team to sort of be able to pull that apart and figure out what all of that means. And then also be able to distill it and communicate it to people that are making those buying decisions, you know, workflow decisions, I should say. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:12:07 Interesting side note on, uh, the content we created, we forced our engineers to be teachers. And that was an interesting, uh, experience. And we are glad that we have so passionate engineers because they really passionate about the partners and everything. And I invest at a time I'm a big fan of, you know, req to what is needed. Um, you English like being agile all the time. So yes, we adopted a program that we have a professional trainer who's interviewing to engineers and then doing the training part. So Ben, when you did the training, uh, you actually heard the voices and the recording from some of our, uh, star engineers when they talking about what they did and how did it and how it's working and, and, and so on. So I mean to, to add what they've really said is, um, Jeremy do something like a Shoemaker should stay be a Shoemaker.
Speaker 2 00:12:56 I'm not sure if that makes sense. You have a craft, you have an arch, you, you are best then make this the best one and enable others to doing what they can do best. And I think that is the, I wouldn't call it the beauty of the system, but it's one reason of, of this is really that we are focusing on what we do best building the best user experience for creatives. And you guys are what are you best? Which is billing workflows and consulting and delivery services. Um, and that is the vending game for any client because together that is a real solution that has belly to what the client needs.
Speaker 1 00:13:38 I would add that sometimes the client doesn't know what's best for them necessarily. And, uh, you know, the while at the end of the day, the customer is always right, right. But at the same time, sometimes they like to be advised, right. So one of the ideas of this program that Michael put together was to bring you guys into what we would call our advisory council, right? When we have a lots of customer advisory council. So we have them for all the major media houses where we hold these things. And people have often asked me, certainly over the past 20, some odd years, you know, how did premier just kind of just kind of go along and then kind of skyrocket up. It really started to take off. And customers started to designed, designed premiere, right? And even some of the things we've got going on with after effects now with multi rendering and multi frame rendering and things.
Speaker 1 00:14:24 Well now let's take it's time to take another piece of that, which is to bring you guys into that advisory council and sort of say, look, we see all of these types of problems that are kind of common to these sets of customers. So maybe, you know, this is part of that, putting you guys into that trusted advisor, which is a term that we use a lot at Adobe as, as Michael had mentioned before, it's like, how do we bring you guys into that to give the perspective of your, and you're representing them at the table for when we're talking about new technologies, like speech to text, which we're going to be rolling out later, later this year, it's in beta and the transcription stuff is amazing. You know, it's going to have lots of languages and it's going to be really flexible. And, and it's a whole new workflow that you're just now starting to see and the latest release, uh, premiere pro 15, um, will you guys getting in on the early discussions around those technologies and where we're headed with cloud edit and other things, um, put you in a little bit of that driver's seat where you get to represent the customer.
Speaker 1 00:15:26 So, Michael, I thought that was worth sort of mentioning some of the advisory part of this because it is a lot of responsibility, uh, for you guys as well to kind of speak up and for us to sort of take what you say seriously and bring that into engineering and say, look, Jess is saying that, you know, this could be an issue for this, this type of customer, or that requires 7 0 8, uh, quality control and, and some other things that are going on, for example, like in captions and we all know this technologies, it never stays static. It is always changing. Yes. It's always changing.
Speaker 0 00:15:58 I got one for you, Dave. Yeah. Can we open a panel without opening a project? This is a big, uh, this is a big use case for a lot of our customers. You have a ma'am and the ma'am has a panel for premiere. Yeah. There's, there's this concept of, of, of managing the project and its sort of life cycle, the project itself, the project file. And we often find that there's some confusion because we can't open the panel to open the project. We have to open a project first, then open the panel and then there's this disconnect between the project we have open and the project that's in the panel.
Speaker 1 00:16:31 Yeah. Talk about, about pants, right. Because first of all, and this is a again, discussions that Michael and I got pretty early in, uh, we're putting some of this together. Um, so a panel for those that don't know, um, and again, any resizable window and in our applications, especially on the pro video side and pro audio side, as you resize things, each one of those squares, those work areas are called panels and the things that you highlight. So we give the ability through our software development kit and what's known as API APIs for a direct connection to something could be frame IO could be a, a man vendor could be, we have like 300 of them available and you can get them up on the extension store. Many of them, by the way, uh, are free, uh, pretty amazing, but there's integration to make it look like we wrote it.
Speaker 1 00:17:22 And it's a direct connection into this thing. So one of the, by the way, just since you mentioned it, another reason you guys were selected is the ability to go in and do some custom panel work. Right? Right. So it's, it's really important for people to know that, Hey, if I have this Nam and needed to have these extra things done to it or this process, who can I get to write that for me? So one of the criteria is, uh, for this program is to say, look, you need to have an understanding of how the HTML five panels put together. We've got partners for you to work with, uh, that could possibly help you put some of this together and navigate that for the customer. But I do think you, you raise a very good point, which is you raising your hand to engineering, um, our, what does call out our buddy Bruce bolus that puts a lot of this together and engineering on the panel side and say, you know, Hey Bruce, what, what would it take for us to be able to open up a panel, uh, outside of premiere, kind of like what we do in productions today.
Speaker 1 00:18:23 So productions being are locked, Ben workflow where their productions panel more or less opens up first before a project opens up. Right. Exactly. No, I think that's a valid question. And that's an example of where you have a seat at the table where you're like, wow, this, this would really be great. If we could hide all the complexities of a project, whether it's blank or not, it's still a lot of real estate. And just show me a panel,
Speaker 0 00:18:48 Right. Show me a panel window and let me select a project from that panel and open it. Um, and,
Speaker 1 00:18:53 And by the way, I think you're the first ever asked, asked for that, but it totally makes sense to me, Michael, I know you have any thoughts on that.
Speaker 2 00:18:59 There's a way to do and us. Um, and there, the, actually I heard this challenge before and the reason is as you just described, this is a very common workflow. You want to start as a field project. And as I also described, we can't fill a project without a panel on the project. On the integration side, there are ways where you can open up a project, but just not to have felt, uh, or you can use, uh, an incense of premier pro to fill the project or what is also possible. What you can do is you can open up a project and automatically fill in objects. So there's different ways of, of, of doing this to add what, uh, Dave <inaudible> for me. And that is a challenge that I'm not tackling right now, but I, my dream. So if I can dream the program in five years, I want you guys to be a community.
Speaker 2 00:19:49 I want you guys to interact with each other. Even if you may be competing in projects, I want you to build up your own ad exchange. I want you to share codes. I want you to make sure that the knowledge with each single has all the group has, that is not easy to do because knowledge is often a USP, but at the same time together, we are stronger. It's, it's, it's kind of cheesy to say, but I'm a strong believer in teams. And so I actively working and, uh, there, there, there's a common understanding of these other specialties of the different service partners that we have, because they're all different. And number one, and number two is that is where they can support each other.
Speaker 1 00:20:33 Did the Knights at the round table more than you are game of Thrones?
Speaker 2 00:20:39 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:20:40 Yeah. I think it might, it might help if we talk a little bit about a lot of changes that we've seen over the past year, where were you guys have come in and together one I'll throw out. There was like a technology called lucid link. And then we kind of got in and we were working with them small group, and they're talking about, you know, media and entertainment and we kind of taught them a lot about that, but that's just an example of like, we, we both saw this new technology together. Cause I remember talking to Scott, some of the other guys out at that company, I go, yeah, just us picking up on this. I'm like, yeah, they're right. In my backyard, I presented this to Michael and sort of the rest of the worldwide team and said, this technology is, is amazing. Right?
Speaker 1 00:21:21 That was just one example over. COVID how we all kind of came together and we stumbled as wouldn't have been. W we certainly could have saved time. How do we brought this up at the round table, right. Where everybody kind of comes together and says, Hey, there is this new, new technology company that we've discovered that has this really easy and inexpensive connected, uh, cloud NAS that really sings with Adobe software. And then we would tell you guys, which of course we did, Hey, we're working with them to optimize this, that, and the other thing. Um, and that's just just one example. I'm sure we've got, you know, a dozen other ones that are out there this year. But that, that, that to me was very top of mind, um, in particular to let a Mac user stay Mac, right? Cause a lot of these solutions put the Mac user with a PC on the other end, which turns your Mac into a dumb terminal. And I'm multi-platform, I don't, it doesn't really bother me how the customer wants to edit. I just want to make sure they're editing and creating the way they want to. And if you tend to gravitate towards one platform or another Adobe is going to do their best to support you as best we can. And, uh, this was one technology that really came together quick. So again, I just use that one.
Speaker 0 00:22:31 Yeah. I want to back up just for a second and explain what lucid link is for our listeners a little bit, if you haven't heard of it, it is a technology that enables you to sort of work with a file system, uh, or, or, or I should say it enables you to, um, work with cloud storage as if it were a file system in a sense. And it sounds a little scary because file systems can have lots of data on them and we don't necessarily want to be like, you know, mounting a file system across the internet and giving you access to all of the content and everything. But, uh, we want to present it as if you do have access to all that content. We just don't want to be pulling it all down all the time because that, that costs a lot of money. Just to dive into that really quick into the technology. I kind of works a little bit like a metadata controller sort of file works a little bit like something like quantum StorNext or something like that, where, where the, where the blocks are being stored in the, in the cloud. There is a metadata, when I say metadata, I mean file system metadata, metadata about the files themselves. And, um, our most senior engineer actually was really impressed with the solution, which is, which is pretty, pretty fantastic.
Speaker 1 00:23:35 I think with productions, by the way, which is what I mean, we've got some major films being done on lucid Lang. Uh, it's really a neat technology. And the other part of that, just to pull it back, the service provider side, um, is we started working with man vendors saying, you really need to look at this and we've got Emam and, uh, companies like IPV and other others are looking at this cat DV has got things going on and it's just going to become kind of a normal thing.
Speaker 0 00:24:02 We've got, had an upcoming episode scheduled talking to those fine folks. So we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive there. And Dave, if you've got any tips and tricks that you guys have already dug into, I'm sure folks at Chesa who are already starting to spec stuff and do it, we would love
Speaker 1 00:24:17 To talk. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And again, it goes back to some of the program that Michael put together, which is, and again, she's lucid as an example, um, where I'm working on a particular project or production, some of the files are 20 gigabytes, you know, what does that mean for my, for my cash size? And, and how is that going to affect my lucid is how do I, and for us, you know, we want to delightful as corny as that might sound a great experience for the customer. You know, nobody wants a lag kind of here or there, and you might get a little lag, you know, and, and I think there there's other technologies out there and things that I'm working on behind the scenes now I've been playing around with some SRT technology that is going to allow people to send the program monitor over to your LG TV or your iPhone, and they'll support, you know, 10 bit, uh, on an iPhone 12.
Speaker 1 00:25:10 So you can review HDR. So it's like, oh, you gotta kind of know the latest iPhone technology and what does SRT versus NDI, which we're all huge fans of collaboration is a, is a huge hole. I think we can all agree on that right now, you know, and they would rely on you guys to come in and say, well, here are some of the collaboration tools. We've got awesome tools, uh, like frame IO, you know, all, all a part of what, what makes up this program to give the customer, as Michael said, the best possible experience that they can get. And again, we know that when the experience is good with our software, then they don't question that next renewal or that monthly charge, right. You've got to do what you can do to make it as best as it can be set up
Speaker 0 00:25:55 Going through the training. I was surprised to dig deeper into a lot of the cloud integration stuff that you guys have done in the backend with shared libraries, obviously team projects and productions. Those are some of the things that I've seen, like glancing blows to my consciousness, you know, passing by as they got released, but actually having the time to dig deeply into some of the new possibilities and kind of the, um, connected experience that you guys are really working towards. There's another term that brought to light via the training, the content velocity, right? We're, we're living in a time where, you know, it's kind of the golden age of media that we're, we're seeing in making so many awesome new things that everybody wants to be making better things faster. And more importantly, people don't want to spend the time doing mind-numbing tasks. If we can bring to bear amazing technologies to help us get to the cool creative stuff a little bit faster. And it seems like you guys are really, really dedicating yourselves to, uh, furthering the art without really taking the creative out of it. And so kudos for that. And I'm looking forward to even greater toys to
Speaker 1 00:27:16 Play with. Definitely. We're trying to use AI to, to be a creative assistant for you, which is, so we're not going to say let's create for you. Let's use it to give you some options. You're still in the driver's seat, but there's a lot of things you don't want to spend time doing, or you just, you know, you either can't bill for it, the client's not going to pay for it. How, how can we use, uh, any sort of automation with, uh, with AI and you you've seen some of the tricks we've been able to do with Renault brush to, and after effects to separate things out and separate action. Uh, and just more and more things like that will be coming to be those creative assistance for you. I mean, anything to add to that, Mike, uh, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:27:58 There's not a single week where I don't get reached out about how can I automate my video production and that's coming from brands and from broadcasts or from anyone. I, I, you know, I want my logo to be automated like this, and I want to, you know, I need 15 different versions now, but, um, I just heard, I need to produce this 15 different versions with 20 different language versions. So I just add a multiplicator by 20. And that was just happening in last week was, uh, to European soccer league. Um, or as I call it the football league just to be chairman, but that is something, you know, which is, uh, um, excites us, but also shows, um, automation is nothing that is easy to build out of the box and we can promise you, we know it's not easy. Yes. We spend it a very long development cycle on all to reframe, which is automation of very, very boring task, which is reframing and cropping pictures for a social video.
Speaker 2 00:29:00 The thing we're doing is really about productivity for all. It's a phrase, but I do believe in this, um, credit, if you've all is a lot of enablement and it's a lot of accessibility and also something about democratising access to, to ability. And we see tons of use cases where we're, um, there is a gap between what we, someone expected to use. You can do, and to use this by itself thinks they can do plus how they be able to use the right templates and the company CIO and this kind of thing. And that is another big where we want you guys to actually step in. As you can change the whole user experience, you can adopt premier pro, you can pull buttons out, you can build a panel that is doing something you can build a fitting user experience for the video channel list that only needs to do very fast cuts. And maybe although a third. And that's it, you, you, you will deliver this thing. And I'm excited about because I'm looking forward to see the examples from the user,
Speaker 1 00:30:16 Which is by the way, not easy, you know, no interface design, I've always admired companies like Atomos and companies like that to put this very simple UI on a touch screen, cause we've all seen touch, touch screens, which are just awful that involves your everyday. I would think you have to sort of, how do we simplify what's going on with this man? And that's what a panel will do is to give me the big buttons for sure that I can push to make things happen. And that
Speaker 0 00:30:43 Usually that usually depends on having some sort of, uh, of a hub or orchestration layer or something, you know, something in the environment that's driving, all of that, right. That's kind of what we're in the business of doing here at USAA. A couple of things came to mind, especially having gone through the back end training of this and understanding now things like if you have an enterprise count or a, the creative cloud for teams account that we can do things like create specific deployment packages that might also include a CEP panel and maybe even some preference settings that make it easier in that. Like, if we did want to roll out something that was maybe specific to journalists where it had a easier setup for them, that they would just install, we can do that. I didn't know that a month ago, but I do now. Thanks again for listening. The workflow show is a production of Chesapeake systems and more banana productions, original music has created and produced by Ben Kilberry. Please subscribe to the workflow show and shout out to
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