Clint Milby & Jake Fruia
Having attended Adobe MAX for the first time last week, Sneaks Night was one of the best parts of the “creativity conference”. Hosted by Adobe Senior Director Ben Forta and actor/director/writer Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sneaks brought some fascinating insight to the future of Adobe and their place in the technological landscape as a whole.
While many of the MAX Sneaks were amazing, we’re really only focusing on a select few that were our favorite of the night. We chose Gap Stop, for its amazing ability to automatically remove pauses from video, Visual Speech Editor for its simplification of the audio editing process, and Time Of Day for the sheer power in being able to completely alter your photo’s look through the full day/night spectrum. We encourage you to check out the full list of Sneaks on Adobe’s blog, linked below.
Gap Stop
“Say goodbye to annoying jump cuts. This is a new video technology that eases transitions and removes pauses from video, automatically.”
Starting off with perhaps the most impressive of the night, GapStop is something we weren’t prepared for. The sheer power in being able to eliminate the ever evil filler words and awkward pauses that inevitably come with interviews is stunning. The seamless transitions Gap Stop provides after only a few steps lets you spend less time cutting, and helps avoid awkward cuts as a way of solving the problem. The result is amazing, as you can see in the video above, and this is one of the Sneaks we hope to see make it to the market perhaps over any other.
Visual Speech Editor
“Audio editing via (not overly informative) waveforms has been the norm for decades. But not anymore. Here’s a completely new approach to editing audio – making it simpler and more intuitive.”
As mentioned in the video above, Adobe Audition has been used to cut audio the same way for decades now. With waveform editing it’s near impossible to find specific points of interest you may need to edit, such as repeated statements or moving a few lines in the center to the beginning. You basically have to sit and listen to the entire piece several times just to get a sense of what speech is where. With Adobe’s Visual Speech Editor, you are shown a colorful, waveform breakdown of every word in the audio, allowing you to get a visual sense of each aspect of the audio. This one’s understood more easily by seeing it in action, so be sure to check out the video above.
Time Of Day
“Lighting changes all the time, and photographers would love the ability to stop, rewind, and fast forward time. This tool uses huge archives of around-the-clock footage to find and transfer lighting to your own images. This is as close to time travel as it gets.”
“Chasing the light” has been the norm for photographers and videographers alike since the inception of the craft. While this will continue to be the case for video shooters, Adobe showed off something that could revolutionize photography: Time Of Day. Using an algorithm that calls upon timelapsed images of places from all over the world, Time Of Day lets you alter an image with a simple slider, changing the image to reflect the time of day you like. So an image taken on midday can be changed to look like dusk, or midnight. The result is remarkable and the power of Time Of Day is something to witness, so be sure to check out its video above.
Again, these are only three out of thirteen total MAX Sneaks from Adobe. The other ten include an online version of Photoshop for those who don’t have Photoshop on their computer, easily converting 2D images to 3D models, a defogger that removes fog and haze from your images without loss in quality, and more.
So be sure to take a look at all of the awesome MAX Sneaks from Adobe MAX at Blogs.Adobe.com, and let us know your favorites!
