[Music] [Meagan Keane] Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited this year at MAX 'cause I feel like the video peeps have really been the loudest in the keynotes. I feel like they're really showing up this year, which makes me so excited. My name is Meagan Keane, and I am the Director of Product Marketing, leading business strategy for the professional video portfolio at Adobe. I've been at Adobe for 12 years now. And for the last eight, Adobe has truly been the leader in bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning into video creation, into filmmaking. And creatives are the heart of everything that we do at Adobe. So when we're thinking through our strategies and developing priorities around AI and more recently Generative AI, it's really about empowering creatives to do what they love, to be creative.
So my story is that I actually started my career as a filmmaker. I worked for 10 years in documentary, feature films, and anybody who's worked in documentary knows what that also means is some nonfiction commercial work, some other projects on the side. I went to film school. And in film school, I learned about show, don't tell about composition, about how to use editorial to weave a story.
And as I went out into the world and I got my first internship, my first assignment was to digitize Beta SP tapes. Yeah. So I'm dating myself a little here, but the point is that I came of age in a time when we were truly transitioning from film and video into more of a digital space.
And what that meant is, as I moved from intern to assistant editor, ultimately, to editor, the shooting ratios were increasing.
Metadata and media management and honestly, hard drive space was more what I was thinking about than storytelling.
And it was a bummer. I had come out of film school wanting to make an impact with the stories that I was going to tell. And instead, I was being bogged down by the data.
Data wrangling. And if I'm honest, it started to make me question if filmmaking was really the right place for me. If this is going to be what it's like, like, do I really want to be doing this? I love my work at Adobe, but that feeling is what powers me. As we think through our strategies and priorities, I want to put more creativity back into the filmmaking process.
When we are thinking about AI and more recently Generative AI, we, sort of, have two considerations. One is about bringing the creativity back by taking out the tedium, by taking out the time consuming things that really take you away from being creative, by a show of hands, in this room, how many of you have tried any of the AI features in Premiere Pro or After Effects? Yeah. So you know what I'm talking about. A lot of the work that we've done thus far is about removing that time-consuming stuff that just bogs us down. I don't know if any of you have seen that meme, but that says, like, "If AI could just do my laundry, take out my trash, and mow my lawn, like, I'd be good with AI." And that's, sort of, how we've been approaching it in the video tools. Like, take away that stuff that nobody really wants to do. And so with that, I'd like to introduce you to my friend and colleague Kylee Peña, who's going to walk you through some of the current features in Premiere Pro and After Effects powered by AI.
[Kylee Peña] Nice.
Hi, y'all.
How about this MAX? Those keynotes this morning-- Oh, my gosh. I didn't even know I needed that, but I needed it. As a former editor on workflow specialist myself, I have also felt that deluge of tedium, I have too many terabytes in my life, you know? And I am so happy to be part of the team at Adobe thinking of features that can really help y'all do your best work. And a lot of those AI-powered features in Premiere Pro and After Effects, you might not even realize they're AI-powered. So I want to show you just a few of my very favorite ones today. Starting out with Text-Based Editing. Okay, first, who has used Text-Based Editing? Okay. The other half of the room, you're about to have your minds blown. So what do we mean by Text-Based Editing? It makes editing video as simple as copying and pasting text. So let me show you what that means on my laptop here, with my teeny-tiny screen and mouse. This is the perfect setup for editing. So this really starts on the Import tab. I now have an interview here with a coach. And over here on the side, there's Automatic transcription options.
And we have 18 languages you can choose from or you can separate speakers and, you know, Auto-transcribe all the imported clips. So I can import that, but I've got a prebaked cake here. So I'm going to go ahead and launch that.
Okay, so I already have my speakers labeled here and I can see the whole interview that I have, but instead of listening to all of this and trying to hunt for that perfect thing, I can search for I know he mentions his university. So there it is. I see university right here. Great. So all I have to do now is just highlight this and I'm going to get Insert right up here at the top. You can also, of course, hit your keyboard shortcut. Boom. That happened real fast. Now it's down here in the timeline. Let me do it again for you 'cause it's, kind of, blink and you miss it which is just the point. Highlight this. Hit Insert on your keyboard. Now it's on the timeline. Okay, so that's pretty cool, but now I'm going to switch over to a rough cut that's already in progress here. And something interesting has happened. This transcript has changed. Now I'm seeing the sequence. So let me show you the original source again.
This is the source transcript. I can look through it, but the real fun happens when I click into the sequence here. And now whatever's in my sequence, I see over here and it dynamically updates. Let me zoom out of the timeline here. So I can edit this like a text document. I can go through and reorganize my story and get my rough cut going without having to search and listen. So I can use cut and paste all familiar with that. You can use your keyboard. I'm going to right-click so you can see no funny business happening. Right-click Cut, and then I'm just going to go back up to the top here, and I'm going to hit Paste. And now down here on the timeline, it's reorganized for me. So you can imagine how frankenbiting you can do. You have God like powers now. You also might notice, we have filler words in here. Filler words are when someone says um or I, and sometimes you want that and sometimes you don't. And in this case, I think maybe I don't. University, Go Tigers-- I can just click on that and hit Delete and it's gone.
But what if I have a lot of filler or pauses? See, I have pauses in here. That's pause. I can go to a new bulk delete options, hit Pause, hit Delete, and I'm going to-- I can close all the gaps which is probably what you want to do, but I'm going to leave gaps so you can see the magic happen, so I'm going to hit Lift, Delete all, and look at all these gaps. In an instant, all the pauses gone. And when I'm done with my edit, I can use this transcript to make captions almost instantly, and they're already here for me in there. And then from there I would go to school. So that is Text-Based Editing. So I hope that you'll try that out. Are you excited about Text-Based Editing? All right. Yeah. Of course.
Now I'm going to show you Enhance Speech. Has anyone tried this? It's currently in Premiere Pro Beta. Okay, not enough for you. I'm switching over to my Essentials workspace here, and I have this clip, and you might-- This might feel a little familiar. Have you ever gotten something that sounds like this? Today particular, man, today is Tuesday, so we'll start it out on high-- Production's like, "Oh, the lav mic broke." Good luck. Fix it in post. And you're like, "Oh, sh-- Okay." Well, now in beta, I just click on here and go over to the Essentials Sound panel and turn on Enhance Speech. It's going to think about it and do a little bit of enhancing. This is all happening on your laptop, so you don't have to go out to the internet. You don't have to worry about connectivity if you're isolated, and let's try that again. Particular, man, today is Tuesday, so we'll start out on high. I had a warm-up. And after that, we'll just do a little stretching, had some drills. Get a free walk down. And then we'll dive into the meat of the workout. I mean-- Thank you. It's so nice to be working on something behind the scenes, like, furiously, and then be able to be the one taking all the credit. So there's this Mix Amount slider here so you can decide how much enhancement you want on it 'cause sometimes you want it to sound very much like a podcast and sometimes you don't. So that's Enhance Speech. And while we're on the topic of audio, which I find personally very tedious, I'm going to jump over to a rough cut I have going on here. Let's see. Rough cut, rough cut. There we go. Nope. Wrong rough cut. There we go. All right, so I have this great music track here and if I can drag it in here, I license it from Adobe Stock. It's awesome. But, you know, it's just like a little too long. So I could go in and chop, chop, chop and do all the subframe tweaking and finding the right musical phrases. But, you know, I just really don't want to do that, and I can auto-tag this so it automatically gives me music related effects right here, but I'm going to use Remix. It's right here, kind of, hidden a little bit under the Ripple Edit Tool, go to Remix. All I have to do is drag this back and it we'll sink about it and place those edits for me. Not emojis. Not right now.
So it plays the edits for me and you can adjust how many segments and things like that, but you don't have to go in and spend that time. I love doing that but sometimes, you know, you just don't have time. So let me solo that and you can see if you can tell where the cut is. [Music] Let me do this one. [Music] That is such a huge time saver, it's unbelievable. And I know you're like, "Oh, of course, it works as a stock music." I can't license every song here. Like, Taylor Swift, Money, I don't have that over here. Go try it with a song you're really familiar with and you'll be like, "Oh, okay. What kind of black magic is this?" So I'm going to switch over to After Effects. And I want to show you Roto Brush really quick. So Roto Brush has been in After Effects for a hot minute, but the Roto Brush is now AI enhanced. It's faster, more accurate than ever and it works with overlapping limbs, and hair, and transparency. So if I need to roto this, I'm probably going to lose it a little bit. I mean, I don't even know where I would draw the mask, but now luckily we have a new AI-enhanced Roto Brush. So I can just go in and grab the Roto Brush here. And just draw just like the most beautiful, kind of, mask and it's so hard to draw a mask up here with this teeny-tiny little mouse. But let's just give it a shot.
I went to school for this.
So, like, that's not bad. I can, kind of, like, go in and we have the edge refinement tool, but it does a pretty good job and now I can just propagate that mask. And it'll think about it and propagate it throughout the mask.
There we go.
So it just, kind of, thinks, thinks, thinks forward, backward. You can see the green line of magic here and look at what it's done. That is not bad for a really fast roto...
On stage in front of a bunch of people. So let me go back to the comp here. And Composition right here. So you can see I'm going to show you exactly what's going on. I cut that out, rotoed him out, and now I have him duplicate on the back and I can add text behind him.
And there, I have a piece that's probably good enough and I can go in and make it even better just as fast. So those are just a few of my very favorite AI-powered features in Premiere Pro and After Effects. And we have a ton more. They only gave me like eight minutes to tell you, and that's not enough, so come see me, but that's what's possible right now today. But what about what's next? Where do we want to see Generative AI show up in our video tools? We put together a video where we can imagine that future with you. So take a look.
[Music] When I get to the crag, I'm putting on my shoes.
When I get to the crag, I'm putting on my shoes. I'm chalking up. And then I'm excited to get on the wall. I get on the wall with focus. [Music] So as we are evolving our thinking from artificial intelligence into more of the generative space, we have two major considerations that we're thinking through as we develop our strategies. One is to continue increasing productivity, things like content intelligence to help with all of that data wrangling, intelligence search, helping us wade through all of this media that we're having to deal with these days. And the other is to spark creativity, to help with ideation, to help think through new concepts and to ultimately bring more creativity back into the creative process. While we have yet to announce or reveal any new features for video in the GenAI space, we do have a lot of video professionals who are already starting to use Firefly in their workflows in Premiere Pro and After Effects today. So with that, I'd like to introduce you to AJ Bleyer to walk you through how Firefly is showing up in his work.
[AJ Bleyer] Yo! What is up, Adobe MAX? Whoo! It's cool. You know, if you're bouncing around the conference today and it feels a little bit different than it had in previous years, it's because it is. This is an exceptionally exciting year for Adobe and just to be a creative in general, and that makes it that much more of an honor that I get to be here with you all today. So thank you all for being here, and thank you, Adobe, for having me. For those that don't know me, my name is AJ Bleyer. I'm a DGA Director and the Founder of Advent Films. It's a commercial company based here in Los Angeles. We do a lot of really cool work with supercar brands and video game companies. But today, I'm here to talk to you about a new tool. I'm really excited to begin incorporating into my work, and that's using Generative AI in video projects, which is something I just don't think enough people are talking about yet. You know, well, I think Adobe just released Generative AI a handful of weeks ago. And while it's not yet in Premiere, it's already opened up a world of possibilities for filmmakers. And I think there's three really important use cases everybody should be messing with right now. The first one is what we just saw from Kylee, right? And that's a lot of the time-saving capabilities, the auto-transcription, color correction, masking and tracking. That stuff is wild. But I think it gets really interesting when you begin to think about it as a utility with older footage. You can do things like reframe it or clean up stuff you never thought you could or adding resolution. And it gets even more interesting when you begin to think about it as a creative tool, shooting for Generative AI and using it to enhance your locations and your props, and even adding props in. So I think we've already heard a little bit about the time-saving stuff. So let's focus on the other two right now, starting with it as a utility. For this portion of my talk, I got to thinking, I was like, "Okay. Well, do I have any old projects that I wish I had Generative AI for?" And the answer is, yeah, actually I do. One came straight to mind, and it's, kind of, interesting 'cause it's a personal project from a couple of years ago. I happened to be in LA during March of 2020 it was, like, kind of, the beginning of the stay-at-home order. And I just remember as a native. I just woke up one day and I saw my city in a way I'd never seen it before. So, kind of, sensing that it was a moment. I grabbed my a7R at the time and a tripod, and just, kind of, went out to capture the city. I wasn't really sure why or what I was going to do with it, but I'm really glad I did 'cause I got a suite of, kind of, interesting footage. Here's a small sample of that footage right now.
[Music] It's a little sample, right, kind of, wild footage, right? And-- Oh, thank you. And when I first posted it, it did all right online. Got some attention on Reddit, even I write it from the LA Times, which was really cool. But social media is a way of changing pretty quick. And with the rise in popularity of TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, a lot of us consume our video vertically these days. So it's, kind of, no surprise that when I tried to post it on one of those platforms without messing up my composition, it sucked. It did not look good at all. There was so much wasted space. It didn't perform well at all. But that got me thinking, like, "Could I use this to, like, make it a vertical video?" And that's what we're going to mess around with today. So as we transition into our Adobe software together, there are two quick things I do want to say 'cause I think it's really important to those watching. The first is that everything you're about to see here is real, and it's happening live. None of this has been pre-generated. So you and I are going to see what Generative AI can do for us together. And the second is that it's really important for me in this demo that this we've seen as much of, kind of, a thought exercise as it is a creative session. As we do this, I want you to really think about how you could use these tools when you get home to your own hard drive and open up your own footage. Yeah? Cool. So here I have a sequence right here, and here's my empty LA stuff. And as I was thinking about, like, "What clip do I want to try and expand here?" I found myself, kind of, gravitating towards this last one for a couple different reasons. I actually already threw it into its own sequence. And there's a lot of stuff going on. Aside from having that bird flying through the frame that, kind of, really shows it's a video, I do a lot of compositing in, like, my automotive photography work. And this has a lot of difficult stuff going on. We have two trees with, like, completely different lighting. We have the ground coming towards us for depth. And then we have that that gradient sky, which if you ever tried to extend that manually, it's really, really tough to do. So how would we even begin approaching this? What we're going to start by just exporting a single frame, like a TIFF out of Premiere, which I've already gone ahead and done. It's on my desktop right here under Santa Monica TIFF, and we're just going to drag that into the snazzy new version of Photoshop. Now you can see here that the aspect ratio here is 16:9, and I'm just using the Crop tool here. If we were to flip that and do it vertically, it just ruins the whole comp-- I can't even fit the whole roller coaster in this thing, but this is where it gets crazy. We're going to zoom out here and still just in the Crop tool. I'm going to extend it vertically until it, kind of, snaps with the diameter of the original frame. Right there. And I'm going to just drag this to the center to make it nice and easy. And you can see that I have this new Generative Expand option here. And what, kind of, prompt would I say to have it, kind of, do all of this? And I'm going to do nothing. I'm just going to let it roll automatically. Now the biggest tip I have if you're messing around with this tool is just to always run it twice. Sometimes I get so excited by the first three options it gives me that I just get lost in that. But I just always try to run it twice 'cause you just never know what you're going to get, but you can see why it already has done such a crazy job that skies extended beautifully, the ground had extended the pavement here. Let's see what else we got. Added in some dirt there. Added in some grass. Now of these three, I like the first one, but we're going to run it again. And keep in mind that you don't even have to take these at face value. This is just a start. I didn't even give it a prompt. We can go on top of this. We can add a brick road. We can do whatever we want here. But I'm just going to run it twice and look here, it added in some grass in the foreground. Some more pavement there, that's kind of neat. And this right here, look, it gives a-- This is nuts. So you can tell here in the corner that I now have some layers going on, right? I have my generative stuff, and I have the original layer here. Let's run with this one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to untoggle the original frame and I'm going to save it as not a TIFF, as a PNG and because we're representing Adobe today, we're going to totally entitle our exports responsibly and have good file management, which all of us do.
I'm so glad that landed.
And here we go. It's going to spit it out on the desktop. And you can tell if I just quick view this. Get Photoshop, by the way, that a couple of things are going on. It really did save that transparent layer, but it also feathers it, which is really nice to help it be seamless. So now let's throw it back into Premiere. And there's a couple different things we can do from this position, right? I could go into my Sequence Settings and change my pixels and my aspect ratio and do it that way. I think there's an easier way. I'm just going to go to my desktop. I'm going to grab my new PNG, just drag it into the project. I'm just going to right-click on it, and I'm going to do New Sequence From Clip. So now I got this brand new sequence with the right aspect ratio and the right pixel dimensions, I'm going to take it there. I'm going to grab my original frame. I'm going to paste it underneath, trim it so it's nice and neat for you. And if I've done my job, we now have this incredible new video with this whole new aspect ratio and there's two things about this that are really important to keep in mind. The first is it preserved all of the motion and video in the middle, right? So it still is a video there. But second to that, we didn't lower the quality of this at all. In fact, we just built on top of it of the original resolution. We've added resolution. We haven't taken anything away. And look, that was just a quick example done in a couple of seconds of what's possible here. But let me show you what it might look like if we were to verticalize that whole video.
[Music] Crazy, right? Nuts. Thank you. Totally nuts.
And, look, like, I shot this with a really wide angle lens, right? So when you expand that, you get, like, a super wide angle lens. But Generative AI wasn't even a thought in my mind when I shot this footage. So if it's this good at working with footage, it wasn't even intended for. You can, kind of, begin to think about how interesting and cool it gets that you start shooting for it as a creative tool. So let's move on to the second half of this thing instead of talking about it as a creative tool for your storytelling. All right, I'm excited for this part. 'Cause for this, I was thinking about-- All I knew is I wanted to shoot something really, really, really simple, and I wanted to show how magical you could enhance it if you use this tool. So thought of this idea. I was like, "All right. Well, what if I like film a little sequence?" Where I'm like, "On some epic question." I'm like, "Traversing all of these crazy locations and difficult terrain to arrive at this mountain with like 1,000 stairs and as I'm climbing this mountain with all of my might, to reach this magical golden temple at the top." This jogger just like blows past me. I'm like, "Stop at the last minute." But I wanted to shoot this, and this was important to me. I wanted to shoot it using nothing but public, easily accessible free locations, and I wanted to use it using nothing but my tripod, my camera, and my buddy Adam Malt somewhere who's the jogger. So with that, let's dive back into our software. And I have a sequence right here in Premiere. So this was just me on my stomach in the middle of Santa Monica and I had this idea of like, "Well, what if I turn this into, kind of, like a Sahara Desert, kind of, shot in the middle of my journey?" And I'll show it to you here. As you look at the scene, there's a couple of things, like, there's the PC chair behind me. Don't appreciate the laughter. Actually, on that point, as I was filming this, there was a small family that, like, passed behind. This is true. I wasn't planning on saying this. In the back of the thing, it just, like, decided to watch for, like, as I did this for 100 takes and they just stayed.
But there isn't an important part here. Do you notice how behind me there's that little trail that goes in the back? And I had this idea of like, "Well, if I expand the setting, maybe I can make that trail look a lot grander than it is right there." So how are we going to expand this scene? Kind of, similar, kind of, different. It's going to start the same way. Just export a TIFF out of Premiere. And I have that on my desktop ready to go. Sand crawl, and let's put it into Photoshop. Now we're not going to expand it in this direction because we did that before. We're going to actually expand it at the original ratio 'cause I just want-- I like maybe I'll make myself smaller, but I like that this is a horizontal video. But before we do any of that, I find that if you want to expand it, it works a lot better. Before you expand, you get the frame looking about as good as you want the final frame to look. So here, I want to get rid of everything that isn't sand, right? It gives away where we are. So I just selected the background here, going to grab my little Marquee tool, maybe save a little bit more of that sand, put me on the Option key just so you remove it. And now it's time to give it a prompt. So we're going to enter in a prompt here, and I'm going to type in view of distant-- I hate typing in front of people, you know? View of distant desert sand dunes on the horizon. Now as I enter this, you'll notice, "Okay, that was a pretty specific prompt." And that's on purpose. As is the case with all AI, a lot of the nuance lies in the prompt. If I said something like sand dunes or sand, it might just create a hill behind me, but saying I want a view of distant sand dunes on the horizon gives it a much clearer idea of what I want. And look, all right. A little bit of traffic in the desert today, but it's cool. I mean, this is not Santa Monica. Let's see what else we got. Got a bunch of options here, and I'm going to go ahead and just run it one more time 'cause that's what I'm going to do. And this is actually a great example. I might stick with this one because I want to show you how easy it is to just build on top of this, build on top of the single prompt. So as this rock and rolls, and I'm feeling a lot less awkward about crawling through my-- Look at that, unreal. So I like one of the recent ones. I like that one. It, kind of, feels like a bit more of an expanse. I find that Generative AI is really good at two different things. I mean, it's got a lot of stuff, but it's really good at finding anomalies in a pattern and, kind of, picking out stuff. And it's also really, really good at expanding. And that, kind of, feels a little distracting too. So I'm just going to say make sure that's in there. I'm going to just say move people. And some of that stuff isn't people, but sometimes giving it a keyword like remove, or add, or straighten tends to help out the prompt a little bit. So as this goes and, yeah, this is so quick. If you do see that it extends that little trail though that I was talking about before. It, kind of, stretched that out a little bit wider. And if this doesn't stop, which I feel like it is, it's usually pretty good at this stuff. Fantastic. Now we're going to do one last thing. I'm going to take the crop tool, and without changing the aspect ratio, I'm just going to make it all a bit bigger. So I make myself a little bit smaller in this desert wasteland. And as that runs, you notice I'm dragging it into the center of the frame. You don't have to do that. It just makes it easier for me to snap it back together into Premiere. But you can raise the horizon or extend in any direction you want as long as you, kind of, just line it up when you get back into Premiere. And after this, I'll show you how I do line that up 'cause it's actually a pretty easy process, right? See what we got. Thank you.
So we have a couple of more layers here and it does a really good job, right, of just, kind of, creating every input as its own layer. I'm going to untoggle the original frame. This is it's going to get familiar again. You're going to see my flawless file management habits. Cool. Expand. Great. It's a PNG. Save it. Saving at the bottom left-hand corner.
And as we get back to the desktop, there it is. So as we open up Premiere again now. We don't need to create a whole new sequence 'cause I like the same aspect ratio, but what I am going to do-- Here it is. We're going to drag it just on top of this clip. But this is now a larger resolution, right, 'cause I expanded the original one. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the scale here and shrink it so that it fits into the sequence. Now pay attention here. I just shrunk it from the scale of like 100 to now it's 48, but now I'm cut off, right? So if I take my original footage and I just shrink it to the same scale, perfect, and suddenly now who is the weirdo crawling on his belly now? It looks great. I mean, it's just that you had a little sound design in this. You got a little bit of camera shake. It's so convincing, and it's so good. So once again, this was another quick example done in five seconds, but here's what it might look like if we were to expand that entire adventure.
[Music] Now I want to show you some of the original footage too, just so you can, kind of, see what I was working with here. So this was the original shot, right? There's an ocean there. But now with just a quick thing of Generative AI, I have like a broken plane and it's a wasteland. And then you add a little camera shake just like that. So subtle, it really sells the whole effect in a big way. Here I was just hugging a wall. The ground was right there. I just was acting all scary, but now I'm inches away from certain death at the edge of a perilous cliff. This was me just by a lifeguard tower, and now, suddenly, I'm a bad boy. It's never been easier.
Here's the sand now. I wanted to show you with a little bit more time. I'm actually smoothed out the sand around me to really accentuate that trail going into the distance and the sound design, you can really hear it. And then lastly, you can really use the resolution here as a storytelling tool. You'll notice that I actually start here cropped in. And then, comedically, as I see him past me, I turned back around. I then cut to the extra wide to, kind of, show it off. And look, this is just scratching the surface of what Generative AI can do. And as you continue to go around the conference, you're going to engage with a bunch of really talented creatives. Some of them might hit you with the technique you weren't aware of, or a keyboard shortcut you didn't know existed. But if there's anything that I could leave you with from this talk, it's just to think bigger. Generative AI is the ability to completely expand and elevate the work you're doing with your new projects and your old projects. The only limitation is your mind. And with that, I just want to thank you everyone for being here, the people online and here. If you're interested in seeing any more of my work and the stuff I do with Generative AI, this is my social media. I hope some of this stuff just got you thinking. Do something nice for a stranger today, and thank you all so much. Have a great MAX.
AJ, thank you so much. I have to say that the work that you and others are doing with Firefly right now are really inspiring our teams in terms of how we're thinking about natively integrating some of this into Premiere Pro and After Effects. Now I'm very excited to chat a little more with you and another absolute powerhouse filmmaker, who is pushing the limits of how Generative AI can work in video. Let's take a look at the work of Valentina Vee.
[Valentina Vee] Thank you. Hi, everybody.
Now for the last year, the Adobe video team has been investing a lot of time in connecting with community. Community has been a big topic here at MAX. I hope you all have realized that, but we've met with over 1,000 video users across the globe this year. And for the most part, video professionals are excited about Generative AI with some hesitation. Obviously, the strikes in Hollywood this year have really been a big part of that, sort of, concern over, is GenAI going to start taking over our jobs? So we'd be remiss to have this conversation and not be addressing some of that. AJ, I'd love to hear from you what elements of GenAI have given you pause and, sort of, why have you chosen to stay positive about the potential? Sure. Well, first off, there's no-- This is a moment, right? And our industry has survived a lot of big changes before. The transition from film to digital feels like the most recent, and this one feels in a lot of respects bigger. But when I zoom out, I'd, in my lifetime, and this was I remember I got a lot of flak for this. I grew up as a millennial and I've never had a professional job that required me to go into a dark room. And I remember I used to feel really bad about that for a while, but these were the tools that I had available to me. And this was the way the industry worked, and I can't help, but realize that I feel like these are the tools that our generation, the next generation will continue to have, and every big change it's happened from Yellow Books, to Google to, you know, agriculture to the tractor coming. There are just big changes that happen, and I do think, we find our way and new opportunities open up. And I'm really excited about this, and I want to be at the helm of that next wave. And, Valentina, you also are really embracing GenAI, really incorporating it into your workflows. Why is it that you're so hopeful about what it can do for the film industry? Well, I mainly work in the non-union world as of now. And a lot of times for me, it's a time-saving measure. Whether I need to, you know, get through a lot of documentary footage really quickly. And I'll use Premiere to find what I need. Like, that used to take me forever. And now it takes me minutes to get a string out together, to put together a rough cut. And that only helps me as a tool. Right now, a lot of the things that I'm doing, I'm not replacing someone, I'm just replacing myself in the future, you know? I'm just helping myself out in the future. But, yeah, I know you're totally right. Like, it's scary, and people have a right to be concerned about it, especially when it becomes sentient. It's scary.
Especially, when it becomes, it pushes past the uncanny valley, right? Yeah. Right now when we're generating people, we can still tell it's not really people. When that happens, there's going to have to be some protections, especially for the lovely actors of the world to make sure that they're not being taken advantage of or replaced. Yeah. And I know that you actually use a lot of GenAI in, sort of, the processes around your video work? - Very true. Yeah. - Talk a little bit about that? As soon as I was able to generate an image, I started doing decks. So as a commercial director, I do a lot of decks pitched to clients, right? And usually, like, maybe 1 out of 12 actually lands and gets me a draw, but that's okay. My decks are the best around because not only can I generate something that hasn't been done before, but I can diversify my generations. How many of you have ever looked for a stock photo or stock footage only to be met with white people only in that stock footage, right, or that stock photo? Well, I prefer to work with a wide range of diverse people. And if I'm going to pitch a project, I want the client to see what it could possibly look like. So I generate an image with more diversity in it. And, AJ, how do you-- I mean, obviously, what you've just shown is a little snippet of how you're currently implementing GenAI, but why do you believe that GenAI has the power to actually bring more creativity back to the creative process? Yeah. I mean, there's so many different parts to that. I mean, starting with previs, I mean, the little teaser that we saw of the storyboards, that's nuts. And as a commercial director, a lot of winning projects really happens before you ever arrive on-set, or pick up a camera, being able to use Generative AI to, kind of, serve the client, a more tangible version of my vision goes a huge way. And then, I mean, you saw what-- I didn't have the budget for a 737 in that project. It allows me to get props and locations that I just were out of the realm of possibility. And even just that little exercise with nothing but my tripod and a camera thinking about what I could accomplish, I found myself really trying to pare down the possibilities more than figure out, like, what I could do. Absolutely. I think there's an element to what you were saying is it's not that people who are already doing the jobs are going to be replaced. It's that more people are going to have access to certain elements of production, pre-production, post-production that wouldn't have had them in the past. Yeah, it's huge. Everything from creating background to painting out things in painting, getting rid of little things. For me, one large thing that I do is I'll do creative lighting, right? And with LED lights, those lights don't throw as far as traditional hot lights, right? But LED lights are cheaper. So one thing you can do is get those lights closer to your subjects to the point where they're in the frame, right? And then just use GenAI to paint out the light itself, that's inside the frame, just paint it out, right? I used to do that manually. I used to do that with the clone stamp y'all. And now I just like highlight it lasso, remove, done. It's huge. It's like, I don't know, I don't know how else to explain it.
Maybe you've realized that this entire conference Adobe MAX should be called Adobe AI or something 'cause everyone's talking about it 'cause that's how huge it is, right? Yeah. So what, AJ, what is like your wide open space in terms of what you hope to see in terms of generative use cases in the next, let's say, two years? Sure. The big thing is just more adoption from the community. I think, Vee said it really, really well that there's been a little bit of hesitation in figuring this out. And I just want to shake every creative, I mean, and be like, try it. It's so powerful. Even in the ideas that you saw in my video earlier today, I got a lot of them just by searching to see what the community was doing. And the community of Adobe creatives really do lead the way beyond software innovation. They really show what's possible in this, kind of, digital space. And I think we have a lot of influence in that regard. I want to see more people adopt it and maybe use it in ways that I haven't even thought of yet. And just 'cause I will tell it to anyone who will listen, like, that storyboard feature looks so cool. I really, really want to try that out. I'm probably most excited for that next. Yeah. You bring up a good point. How many people in the room are currently or have recently tried any of the beta features in beta versions? Okay, a few. I just want to encourage you all to really get in and try because our teams are looking for feedback from the users to tell us, like, are we doing it right? Are there things maybe we haven't thought of that could make it even more useful to you? And that's why we've actually really as a company started talking more about features as they're in beta before they're even out to make sure that we're getting that user feedback to understand how we could build the features the best way possible. Can I answer the future question? - Yeah. - Oh, my gosh. So imagine this. Imagine this, right? AJ's video, he's like climbing up, you know, the thing to the temple, right? But it's not a stick shot. It's not a locked off shot. The shot is moving. The shot has energy, right? - Imagine being able-- - Oh, my gosh. - To track that 3D camera-- - Yeah. And generate, like, the 3D world with depth, right, like, even give it some help. Like, okay, I shot this on an a7R with, like, 58 millimeter lens. And then it can even more accurately. I shot it on S-Log3, and then it gets even more accurately. And we have the lens metadata too, so like-- Exact. Right? Or imagine you're in a completely virtual world, right? It's a volume stage and instead of spending three months to like come up with the perfect castle design, you generate that, right? And maybe the castle has like a flag that you don't like. We'll just change that one area. - Yeah. - And it changes to a different flag. And then generate like an entire 3D world and then plop yourself into it, like, I can't wait. I feel like it's coming. I feel like it's coming soon. And I'm like, yes, yes, 'cause I'm tired of stills. I'm like beyond, I've been on the beta for too long at this point. So I'm like, "I need motion. I need movement. I need lens blur and all of the things." - It's a great answer. - Yeah. That's hilarious. And then another topic that you brought up was the concept of community. I know, Valentina, you are very active on social in community spaces sharing your take on new tech with the ways that you're pushing the limits. Why is that so important? Why is the discourse within the community so important as this technology is evolving? Well, I'm active 'cause I'm really nosy. So I want to know what everyone else is up to. But I think it's really helpful to communicate with people who are in the same industry because that's how I learn. That's my primary way of learning. And I also have a lot of fun at get-togethers like this because I start seeing people that I've met online and connecting with them in real life. I think community is one of the funniest things that you can join and it doesn't have to be like, join the WhatsApp for the community Facebook group of the thing. Just exist. Just exist online, right? Even if you connect with one person, that's still a community. Even if, you know, "Hey, man, I like your travel video." "Here's my travel video." That's it. You know, I think it's fun. And it's important. And what about you, AJ? Why is the discourse around GenAI so important? I don't know, but how many people here are like a graduate of, like, the YouTube University for Photoshop? I know I am. It's really special to be here. I was telling the Adobe team because I just learned Photoshop, and I learned these tools for just one YouTube tutorial at a time. And you begin to realize that, I've seen some of the people I've followed tutorials from, including Vee, by the way, here at this event. And if the community's a lot more tight-knit, it not only is your input helping innovate the actual software and the features that come, but you're educating people around you, including me, by the way. So really just giving back in this, kind of, way and in the same way that all of us do. I think it's what makes the community globe turn, you know? I will say specifically with AI, prompts generation is like a huge topic. - Huge. - How do you make your prompts better? How do you not spend hours trying things out and again and again and again. And there's a lot of creators online who are putting it out there, who are putting their full prompts, who are sharing that information. And that's how I've been learning, like, accurate pop generation as well. - Absolutely. - Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of times, also specifically young people will ask, like, "Well, how do I break in? How do I get myself into my first job in film?" And really it is about engaging in a community, learning from people who are your peers and, sort of, growing up together. - And in our investment-- - More nepotism.
Unfortunately, there's no key to that word.
But if you could pull up the QR code, we have been hosting in-person community events that are really dynamic, folks from all over the video industry, from feature film and commercial, from social to news and sports and just a gathering space to share information. So at this QR code, there's more information about events near you, hopefully, if you don't see one in a location that you're based, stay tuned to this site because we are doing these events every month, all over the country, as well as all over the globe. So we'd love to have you join us for the conversation. And then finally, I'd love to ask, like, "Why do you believe that Adobe is important in terms of the leadership into this Generative AI space?" Well, Adobe is like the big badass in the room, right? Adobe needs to be the leader because we are using all of the other Adobe tools already, right? So if it's integrated and I don't have to leave the program. It is groundbreaking because I stay in my state of flow, you know, the state of flow that you get when you forget to eat, and then it's suddenly six hours later, right? If I have to go to a website and type in a URL and then like pay extra for that subscription and that subscription, like, I'm not going to lie. I have five AI subscriptions right now to different things, right? If that could just be all under Creative Cloud and super easy to navigate, then that just saves me time again, right? Saves me time, makes it more creative. Absolutely. And what about-- Why do you think that Adobe's important in this conversation? Adobe's it, you know, like, in this scene, I mean, Photoshop has become a verb now for so much more than just an application.
I think you-- There's a track record here of being ahead of the curve and being really the first to the jump, when we made this transition the first time from film to digital. And I already see it here today with these tools. I think they are absolutely spectacular. But even more, you seem to be going about it responsively, there is this conversation about ethics and stuff as well. And this is new territory. You know, there really isn't a model for Adobe or anyone else to follow, and yet, I'm still seeing just concerning brought up about, you know, using stuff with Adobe Stock, and you're offering creatives tools to do it in a way that feels right as we, kind of, figure this new landscape out together. So that just makes me have more faith in the brand and the way that you guys are going to continue to traverse it, you know? I'm hoping most of you are familiar with the content authenticity, initiative. It's a program cofounded by Adobe along with a number of other tech companies, agencies, news outlets, there's over 1,700 participating, you know, companies now. And really, you know, for those who aren't familiar, it's, sort of, about putting a nutrition label on content. Showing, sort of, the tracking of how has it been altered, what, you know, generative maybe has come into play to really make people understand when and if images, videos, content has been changed. Why is that the ethical part of this conversation so important? I think it's not only important for the people creating those systems to be ethical, but it's also important for us as artists to ethically state such things. So, for example, I know someone who jumped on the AI trend very early and started making AI generated art, selling it on Redbubble and saying he drew it, you know? And it's good enough to look like you drew except you would have no drawing skills or experience whatsoever. So I think stating generated with AI, or generated with this model, or certain parts of this have been generated, I think that that is just an ethical consideration that we should all have going forward from the very beginning. Credit, where credit is due, you know? Otherwise, it's just forever going to be a Wild West, no man's land, right? Especially, once all of the metadata tools get smart enough to override whatever metadata tools are in there, like, there's always going to be bad actors, but if we can be honest about where we got our images, how we sourced, what we're sourcing, and I'm speaking to everyone in this room right now. Super important to do this right at the onset. I think that we can move on and move forward in, like, and feel good about ourselves. Yeah. And maybe address some of the reasons that people have pause in terms of how this is all progressing? I think a lot of the concerns are people wondering, like, where's my place? In this going to be, not in just the coolness of a brand new paintbrush, you know? So I think she said it absolutely perfectly. I think that's right. We get into opinion land pretty soon, right? When you, kind of, have these conversations about AI and you look a little bit far forward and I think art that is enhanced by machine learning is different than art that is 100% generated by machine learning. And I think learning how to distinguish those and really just credit where credit is due, I think it's the best way to possibly say it. So, AJ, earlier, you really encouraged the room to think bigger to just try it. So, like, what's one piece of advice as people are like, "Well, where do I even start?" - Sure. - Like, that you would give. I really, for me, getting to this level, I now do a lot of compositing in my work as well as an automotive photographer. I said that before, and I'll combine you know, 10, 20, 30 exposures into a single image. And it's funny. I had a moment where I was doing that as I normally do, and I decided to record my screen and just as I did the whole process, then I speed ramped it and just looked at it, and it looked so crazy impressive, done that way. And I couldn't believe that I had done it, but it was just one small tool at a time. This software can seem very daunting when you're starting out. Photoshop really is it's the big pro, you know, bad, bad, bad wolf in the room. It's so powerful, and you really can begin to learn it one step at a time. There's a lot of amazing books here at the MAX store that help you, kind of, you know, figure out this software. I'd really advise you to dive in, and you saw that the prompts that I did in my video were text. It was text. It's something that I really believe everybody here has the ability to create with. If you can just really think of some interesting stuff and shoot some cool place to expand, you can do it with your phone. I really recommend it. It's incredibly thought-provoking, and it does get pretty exciting. Speaking of daunting apps, I think some people feel that way about Premiere Pro, and I'd be remiss not to mention Valentina's trainings on Premiere Pro jump start with Premiere on YouTube. You can find it on the Adobe video channel. But, Valentina, for you, for people who are wanting to get started, sort of, dipping their toe in the generative space, what advice would you give? Yo. It's easy. Just, like, go on your phone. Just try it out. I mean, you would be so shocked and surprised by how fun it is. And if you don't want to do that, listen, on the community floor, there's actually a Firefly setup and they're having like races and competitions about who can generate the best prompt and have the coolest image. So yeah, give it a try. And like AJ said earlier, start thinking about how you could potentially use it for your future projects. For things that you have not yet made that you may want to create, whether it's making something for a pitch deck to pitch a client or whether it's okay, like, this is going to be part of my post-production. And obviously, if you're working with a client, like, test it out first before actually doing it. Yeah. And to that point, if you're here at the show, do go by the Adobe demo stations and have conversations. These are all people who work on our product teams. They're here to get your feedback, engage in the beta, come to our community events. Like, we really want to have these conversations and build our strategies and priorities with you, not in a silo because the whole intent of the Adobe video team in Adobe at large is to really empower creatives as we're going into this new frontier of Generative AI. So thank you so much for joining us. I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your MAX. Enjoy the Bash tonight. - Yeah. - Yeah. See you at the Bash.
- Thank you. - Thank you so much. Yeah. Great time. [Music]