Peter Emery, Matt Bach, and Houston Bennett sit down at Puget Systems HQ to talk about their experiences, takeaways, and perspectives attending Adobe MAX 2024.
A few weeks ago Puget Systems attended the Adobe MAX Creativity Conference in Miami, Florida where creative professionals, enthusiasts, and industry experts come together to learn about the latest innovations and trends from Adobe that are shaping content creation and distribution. At Adobe Max, attendees can network with other fellow creatives and vendors, get hands-on experiences through workshops, discover new tools and technologies that might enhance their workflows, and attend sessions online and in-person to learn about different tools, ideas, and workflows that Adobe and its partners are promoting.
Video Transcription
00;00;00;00 – 00;00;21;20 Houston Bennett
We’re Puget Systems we build high performance PCs for content creation, engineering and scientific computing. Today, we’re going to be talking about our experience at Adobe Max 2024 which is in Miami, Florida this year. Pretty cool, it’s usually in LA. Joined by Matt Bach and Peter Emery. Like and subscribe down below if you want to see more content like this from us.
00;00;25;15 – 00;00;51;26 Matt Bach
Adobe Max is much more of a learning show. People go there to like go to sessions to learn new workflows and different Adobe applications. But they do have a expo area where companies like us can come set up booths, talk to the people that are there, you know, market your products, obviously. But for us, the big thing is just talking to people to learn what they’re doing.
00;00;51;29 – 00;01;09;17 Matt Bach
At Adobe Max this year, we were showing off a little bit different than normal. Oftentimes we focus on our like high performance PCs, you know, tower workstations. But this year we kind of wanted to look a little bit more at our mobile workstations. So we specifically were showing off our mobile workstation versus the top of line M3 max from Apple.
00;01;09;24 – 00;01;22;18 Matt Bach
And in particular the new 3D based workflows in After Effects, because those are really good on PC. Apple is not quite as good, so it’s really easy for us to do as a demo.
00;01;22;20 – 00;01;42;2 Peter Emery
What was cool about Max this year was you could attend it in person or online. I was the lucky one who got to stay at home and watch a lot of sessions online. When you’re in person, you might miss a couple sessions. You might not be able to gather as much information. So I had a focus on seeing different workflows and seeing how that might affect the hardware recommendations we have.
00;01;42;27 – 00;01;54;18 Peter Emery
Articles that we might write about in the future, and there’s a lot of cool things this year that really stood out and I’m excited to talk about it with everyone here.
00;01;54;21 – 00;02;13;23 Houston Bennett
I would say this year it felt a lot smaller, especially compared to the last one we went to, which I think was last year. But from what I’ve heard, like at the keynote, there was over 100,000 digital or virtual attendees, which I think is the most they’ve ever had. Even though it’s a little smaller, I feel like they gave that opportunity to have better conversations.
00;02;13;23 – 00;02;23;05 Houston Bennett
We weren’t overwhelmed with people flowing through the booth or stopping by and things like that. We were able to actually have really good connections and conversations with people.
00;02;23;06 – 00;02;33;02 Matt Bach
It was funny you say it felt smaller because I’m pretty sure the in-person attendance was higher. I’m pretty sure it was, I think some of it was the crowd was very different than normal.
00;02;33;03 – 00;02;43;03 Matt Bach
There weren’t as many students. There was more like team leads. I was talking to people from IT departments, which has never happened at Adobe Max.
00;02;43;06 – 00;03;05;22 Peter Emery
Being an online attendee, they made a lot of really cool announcements with a lot of different programs and seemed like they’re talking a lot about integrating Firefly and more of their AI tools into their apps, and trying to highlight different workflows that creators might be able to kind of dabble with and incorporate into their to their own workflows.
00;03;05;22 – 00;03;28;03 Matt Bach
Like premiere, as part of the keynote was a couple of things they talked about. After Effects? I don’t think After Effects was even mentioned anywhere except to say that like, hey, now you don’t have to go to After Effects, you can do this in Premiere. Out of the keynote, I think the big thing that I got out of it was just how much Adobe is doubling down on AI and specifically generative AI, because there’s a lot of stuff about AI.
00;03;28;03 – 00;03;48;25 Matt Bach
You know, they even mentioned in the keynote about select subject and automatic tracking in Premiere Pro. Now, you don’t have to go out to After Effects and do a roto brush. But when Adobe starts talking about, you know, all of the stuff with Firefly, all the generative AI, how they’re bringing it even more into Photoshop. I remember they mentioned something about how you can do variables now in the Firefly prompts.
00;03;48;25 – 00;04;09;24 Matt Bach
So you can say like a picture of a hidden variables, dog, cat, mouse in a forest, and instead of just getting four returns, you now get four times three. So 12 different returns and stuff like that to me. Like it’s cool, it’s great. But oh my goodness, it’s just making all of this generative AI even more excessive.
00;04;09;24 – 00;04;41;12 Matt Bach
Almost everything that always goes in my head is how much power is that consuming? How much compute is that consuming? And if they’re making it really easy to now make four times more because you’re not sure really what’s in your head, you just shotgunning stuff. It’s like, I’d almost rather they make it easier to get those prompts right first time. Rather than shotgunning and now you’re doing four times more because they mentioned even in the keynote that in the last year there’s been 13 billion images generated with Firefly. That’s a lot.
00;04;41;12 – 00;04;57;17 Peter Emery
Which can be good and bad depending on what you’re trying to do. A lot of people in the industry are facing tighter deadlines and, more constraints. So by throwing more stuff at the wall, you’re able to hit your target a little bit better and be more precise with your creative choices.
00;04;57;18 – 00;05;18;07 Matt Bach
Also too is that Adobe is moving to using credits to generate things via Firefly, and when you run out, it doesn’t not let you generate, it just slows it way down. But still, you get so many credits. And if they’re just going against the, you know, the whole throw spaghetti at the wall kind of approach to chew through those so fast.
00;05;18;09 – 00;05;41;05 Houston Bennett
I don’t play these tools myself much. And so it’s always cool to see how, a professional or an expert leverages them beyond what like I would do just playing around with it and stuff, because it looks like the examples that they show and the people that we have talked to that that are okay with it, it does seem to be a bit of a lever, a tool that does help them to get really cool ideas out onto some, into real life.
00;05;41;08 – 00;05;55;15 Houston Bennett
Even when we provide somebody with a really powerful workstation and it saves them all this time, they’re not going to bed early. They’re not, you know, they’re not quitting two hours early. They’re filling that saved time with a more complex project, a bigger thing.
00;05;55;16 – 00;06;08;06 Matt Bach
I think they were very careful with showing in the keynote, things that do enhance creativity, not replace it. Like they showed in the Premiere Pro, the whole clip extension, which they previewed at NAB in April and now it’s finally actually in beta, like that kind of stuff.
00;06;08;07 – 00;06;24;08 Matt Bach
It’s great. Like no one’s really going to complain about that. Like, to be honest, I did have a few people complain about it on the show floor, but their complaint wasn’t this exists. Their complaint was, people are going to rely on that? And it was the same vibe I got from like people shooting 4K so they can punch in like, no, you should get it right in camera the first time.
00;06;24;08 – 00;06;33;06 Matt Bach
I was like, yeah, okay, that’s great, you should. But if this can save you, like, you’re not going to go back out to set so that you can get an extra second of footage.
00;06;33;07 – 00;06;44;04 Peter Emery
Creators are perfectionists. That’s why there are a lot of creators works are amazing. But what comes with that is a perfection of actually executing.
00;06;44;03 – 00;07;14;00 Peter Emery
And sometimes these extra tools take a little bit of time to adapt to because it’s new, it’s not traditional. It feels like it’s a cheat code in a way, because it’s like, oh, we didn’t do it right or something happened in production or something happened in post-production where… Oh, this note came in. We have to address it, but we don’t have that tail-end. Or they wanted the footage to come through or we’re missing, like one small element that it’s like, this could be a deal breaker. And these are the tools that kind of help, like get over that last finish line.
00;07;14;01 – 00;07;16;18 Matt Bach
These just become another tool in the toolbox.
00;07;19;27 – 00;07;36;03 Peter Emery
Speaking of some of the tools announced in the keynote, were there any other tools that you felt were particularly interesting or worth mentioning that might get some people to think about their hardware choices, or just the systems they run on? Because some of these apps definitely are going to change workflows.
00;07;36;04 – 00;07;50;19 Matt Bach
It’s funny to try to bring it back to hardware, because most of these AI things that Adobe is working on are going to be cloud based. Just like everything Firefly or generative fill in Photoshop. You hit go on it. It goes and runs it on Adobe’s Cloud.
00;07;50;19 – 00;08;09;15 Matt Bach
That’s why you have that whole credit system for Firefly and then it downloads it. So like your system is almost moot. Like it really doesn’t do anything. And a lot of these new things that they’re announcing, honestly, I haven’t even checked yet, but I assume, like the clip extension in Premiere Pro, its got to be cloud because it’s using Firefly as a base.
00;08;09;17 – 00;08;36;17
Matt Bach So a lot of this stuff, your hardware choice doesn’t really affect it. Until you get to the point where you say, I can’t use Adobe’s tool because we have legal concerns, because all the Firefly stuff is supposed to be commercial safe, like everything’s supposed to be totally fine. I think for like a freelancer, no problem. And once you get up into, like, Hollywood level Netflix, you all these big guys, they don’t care if Adobe says it’s safe.
00;08;36;23 – 00;09;03;14 Matt Bach
They’re like, no, we have to control everything. Start to finish. The data, this AI model was trained on what it was run on the output. So they have to control all of it. And I think it’s at that point that really the hardware comes back in, because now you’re having to do it with either an on prem server or you’re having to do it on your local workstation with something like stable diffusion or some other tool, then your hardware absolutely matters.
00;09;03;17 – 00;09;26;23 Houston Bennett
One of the highlights, though, is always the Adobe Sneaks. The sort of the passion projects where some of the engineers and developers at Adobe get to show off the things that they’re working on that aren’t necessarily in the stable builds. I suppose they’re not a part of the normal update. Thinking of the past, you mentioned roto brush two, I think was one of these sort of side projects that actually become something big. So, what did you guys see that you like from the Adobe Sneaks?
00;09;27;00 – 00;09;49;15 Matt Bach
This year I think it was Project Scenic, where it wasn’t just normal AI from a 2D perspective, it was 3D. So it was like make a campfire and tents, and it actually made a 3D of it. Like it’s not a super precise 3D model, but everything that I’ve seen so far doing that has looked terrible, and this looks a lot better.
00;09;49;18 – 00;10;09;21 Matt Bach
It took that and made like, you know, whatever you asked it to make. And then it did a pass on top of that for 2D to do, you know, photorealistic render or a, you know, it basically leverages Firefly on top of it, which I thought was really cool. Use AI to make rough 3D models and then use Firefly to turn that into really nice shots.
00;10;09;24 – 00;10;38;10 Peter Emery
I think one that stood out to me was Project Turntable. All of the Illustrator users are so happy about it, just because of the flexibility to turn 2D objects into 3D and not having to shift all of the art you’ve made, change the shapes you’ve made, to match just a perspective. The example was like that they showed during the sneak was a horse and you see from a flat 2D plane, has two legs, turn a quarter, it has four legs!
00;10;38;11 – 00;10;48;01 Peter Emery
And it’s just like how much time does that save you? My big thing will be how much does the artist say, that’s what I think it should look like versus like this saves me time?
00;10;48;02 – 00;11;11;26 Matt Bach
One thing I liked with that one was it doesn’t create like a 3D model. It actually just makes a new look or a new angle, a new image. And they pointed out that it’s a vector. So the new thing that it made, like if it did something quite not quite right, if it’s something a little bit funky, it’s still just a vector. You just go in and you move those nodes and you can, you can clean it up.
00;11;11;28 – 00;11;47;05 Houston Bennett
The creativity of creative people, is mind blowing to me. I love seeing the experts use these tools and the things that they make. It’s so rad. I don’t get the feeling Adobe was trying to make everybody an expert. I’m never going to be able to use these tools in a way that is going to replace somebody who has spent a decade using these tools. The experience and being able to see the end result and use the tools to get there is not something that an average person is going to be able to do without that experience.
00;11;47;07 – 00;12;23;28 Peter Emery
Some people will be turned off by AI, all these new apps. I think some people do do the work for the craft. Even with all of this, AI talk. It doesn’t really change what people need to work in Adobe at home without screaming at their computer. They still need hardware, they still need good processing. They need even to have like a general base knowledge of like what system requirements are needed to function their applications. Even with all these advancements. Historically, Puget has been powering the creative world for a long time.
00;12;23;29 – 00;12;43;29 Matt Bach
Yeah, the big thing I think I always get out of these shows is just how wide of a variety of workflows there are. Every single person you talk to. It’s different. Either they’re using a different camera or they’re doing a different application or a different workflow, or just something is different enough that it makes what we would recommend to them be slightly, slightly different.
00;12;43;29 – 00;12;59;20 Matt Bach
If you really want to optimize to get the most bang for your buck. It’s always interesting how many people are at these shows where they are like a tech enthusiast. Like they know computers, they want to talk specs, they want to talk cores, and cache, and megahertz, and gigahertz. And how many people will come in and they’re like, I don’t care.
00;12;59;25 – 00;13;20;12 Matt Bach
And that’s a very valid thing. Like they’re spending all their time being creative. Like they don’t want to care about the computer and just the wide variety of that. And, you know, talking to people and helping them understand that, like, we’re here and we are an option. A lot of them have gone with like Apple and Macs for the longest time because it’s easy.
00;13;20;14 – 00;13;44;19 Matt Bach
Like with Apple, you have a budget. There’s like one thing that fits your budget. Cool. But it’s what you’re going to do. PC, it’s Wild West. If you’ve got a fixed budget, you can configure that in hundreds or thousands of different ways. Going to these shows really talking to people really just highlights to me of how important it is for us to try to be that voice to them in particular, not even to the mass market.
00;13;44;19 – 00;14;01;12 Matt Bach
Like we do a lot of stuff to like, try to help everybody, but it’s really those one on one conversations. What are you doing? Okay, this is exactly the right thing for you. You don’t care about tech. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of that. Like you can worry about being creative. We’ll worry about the box that sits under your desk that you don’t want to think about.
00;14;01;12 – 00;14;07;22 Peter Emery
Powered on, know that you have the right equipment, the right processing that’s going to help you get through the thing that you’re trying to accomplish.
00;14;07;23 – 00;14;11;10 Houston Bennett
That kind of wraps it up for our Adobe Max 2024 recap. We’re trying new things with this format and this content. If you’re like it or have any feedback, let us know in the comments and things like that.
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