The #NDI Plug-In for #Adobe Creative Cloud opens up new remote editing and collaboration capabilities with integrated extension panels for Adobe Premiere® Pro and After Effects®.

NDI TV

Check out the video on YouTube here!

NDI for Adobe Creative Cloud — Plugin that allows application output from Adobe’s Premiere Pro, After Effects or Character Animator to be transmitted as an NDI stream. Also allows import and editing of files from captured NDI streams.

Working Remotely
This software toolset offers a number of interesting workflow possibilities for remote groups or individuals working between multiple systems, or even on a single system. Basically, NDI sources take video data from an application, compress it into the NDI protocol and make it available to other resources on the network. NDI receivers, or viewers, take that data stream from the network or another application on the local system and display it or make it available in another program. NDI Virtual Input is a receiver tool that allows nearly any application that supports web camera input to use a live NDI feed. NDI Screen Capture turns your GPU output into an NDI feed that is available to any NDI receiver. The Creative Cloud plugin turns your Adobe application into an NDI source. The Studio Monitor can be both processing and displaying NDI feeds that are coming in and becoming an NDI source of the resulting data.

This makes it much easier to generate high-end tutorials and other screen capture content, combined in real time for streaming instead of editing them together in post. You can easily switch between the application UI and the program output when demonstrating a software function when using Character Animator to generate an avatar of your webcam input for gaming streamers.

There are also applications that allow you to use NDI on other devices, like HX Capture and HX Camera for iPhone. This allows streaming a screen or camera feed as an NDI source over the Wi-Fi connection and NDI Monitor TV, allowing you to view NDI streams via an Apple TV 4K. One of the key benefits of NDI is the widespread support, allowing otherwise incompatible products to pass images between each other.

NewTek sells a variety of products that enable and leverage NDI workflows, from its Spark SDI interfaces to its Tricaster production switching solutions. There are also other vendors, like BirdDog and Magewell, that make their own NDI-based hardware products, and companies like Sienna and vMix have integrated NDI into their software. It is also supported in applications like OBS, which I have been using it with. OBS supports bringing in any NDI feed as a source for your program and can also output its own NDI feed of the mixed stream.

Realtime Recording
While I do very little work in real time, I use SDI to capture NLE output for quick encodes and could use NDI for realtime encodes of my Character Animator projects. Setting NDI as the output in Mercury Transit and recording that stream in NDI Studio Monitor allows realtime recording of anything you can play back in real time in Premiere, After Effects or Character Animator, with alpha channel support. It can even overlay the output from one program over another. This allowed me to composite a Lego puppet I made over a screen capture or Premiere playback output in real time.

The Virtual Input function is especially interesting to me since so many people are working remotely now, which is something I’ve been doing for a while. Usually my boss and I, who are thousands of miles apart, just pass projects back and forth that link to duplicate media. I use VNC over a VPN to operate his system when needed, which offers limited collaboration, but the ability to combine NDI output from Premiere with the Virtual Input allows me to stream the output from my timeline to my boss over Skype for instant feedback of changes I make to a clip or sequence. He is seeing a compressed version of the output, but I have easier access to the software UI and better responsiveness than when using VNC.

Check out the full article HERE.

Learn more about NewTek HERE.

The online artist community COLLECTIVE has just launched another new filmmaking contest to enable and challenge emerging filmmakers. If you haven’t visited COLLECTIVE yet, do it now.

COLLECTIVE is a community of passionate creatives changing the world one frame, pixel, and note at a time. Members live to unlock their potential by learning from each other.

As an exciting way to spread ideas and spark conversations about the creative process — and a regular thrill for its members — COLLECTIVE puts together exclusive challenges or members that are created and judged by its resident pros.

In this latest COLLECTIVE challenge, running July 28 to September 1, 2018, prove your skills by taking the Epic Editing Challenge. Your objective: cut a scene using the scripts and dailies from two film scenes for a chance to win some awesome creative tools from a prize pool worth over $10,000.

We’re teaming up with two highly respected filmmakers and educators

The contest was ideated by, and will be judged by, two of COLLECTIVE’s Resident Pros — Kris Truini and Sven Pape. They’re providing scripts and dailies from two film scenes from past projects they worked on — so COLLECTIVE member, artists like you, can take a shot to remold those scenes in your own vision.

Kris Truini is a director and cinema color expert who runs a YouTube channel based on the idea of free access to filmmaking education. The channel has over 250,000 subscribers and is a small step towards fulfilling Kris’s ambition of making filmmaking knowledge accessible to all.

Sven Pape is an A.C.E. Award nominated film editor who has cut for directors like James Cameron, James Franco, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Mark Webber, including the 2012 Sundance Film Festival favorite The End of Love. His storytelling-focused YouTube channel has over 150,000 subscribers who watch him work on cutting scenes. Sven’s latest film Alt-Right: Age of Rage was directed by Adam Bhala Lough and will hit theaters this August.

How to enter the Epic Editing Challenge

To get in on the fun, visit the Epic Editing Challenge contest page. You’ll start by signing up for COLLECTIVE, if you’re not already a member. Then download the dailies and script and your instructions to edit the footage into a final scene. There are two scenes from different films you can choose from; work on one or both scenes, and submit each of your unique edits to COLLECTIVE as a contest entry to win prizes. Each participant can only submit one version of each scene.

The whole point of the challenge is to see what the diverse talent among all the  COLLECTIVE members will do differently, using their personal vision, references, attitudes, skills and approaches to editing. You’re free to stick to the script provided, or choose to ignore it. You can restructure the scene, eliminate or repeat the actor’s lines in any way you see fit.

Click here for the full article.

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NewTek video content producer Richard Evans and SNS sales manager Steve McKenna show how to use many of the key capabilities of the NRS, which leverages NewTek’s NDI^® technology for bi-directional transport of video, audio and data over standard networks at very low latency and very high quality. NRS is not merely storage but a key production component that includes powerful Media Asset Management (MAM), and which an operator at the system or on a networked computer or device can use to capture live NDI streams, or to play NDI streams to production systems including Adobe^® Creative Cloud^® applications. A wide variety of other MAM capabilities are also present, and all can be used from a browser window on any system or device on the same local network. Click here to read full article.

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I attended my first Adobe Max 2018 last week in Los Angeles. This huge conference takes over the LA convention center and overflows into the surrounding venues. It began on Monday morning with a two-and-a-half-hour keynote outlining the developments and features being released in the newest updates to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. This was followed by all sorts of smaller sessions and training labs for attendees to dig deeper into the new capabilities of the various tools and applications.

The South Hall was filled with booths from various hardware and software partners, with more available than any one person could possibly take in. Tuesday started off with some early morning hands-on labs, followed by a second keynote presentation about creative and career development. I got a front row seat to hear five different people, who are successful in their creative fields — including director Ron Howard — discuss their approach to work and life. The rest of the day was so packed with various briefings, meetings and interviews that I didn’t get to actually attend any of the classroom sessions.

By Wednesday, the event was beginning to wind down, but there was still a plethora of sessions and other options for attendees to split their time. I presented the workflow for my most recent project Grounds of Freedom at Nvidia’s booth in the community pavilion, and spent the rest of the time connecting with other hardware and software partners who had a presence there.

Adobe released updates for most of its creative applications concurrent with the event. Many of the most relevant updates to the video tools were previously announced at IBC in Amsterdam last month, so I won’t repeat those, but there are still a few new video ones, as well as many that are broader in scope in regards to media as a whole…read more