 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are getting towards the end of day three at NAB 2017 and we've talked to a ton of people from security and storage and applications and now we get to talk to a creator. And we're really excited to have Victoria Nissan. She's the product manager for Adobe After Effects. Welcome. Thank you, it's great to be here. Absolutely, but getting a little background on you, you were just really an animator. And Dobie was smart enough to say, hey, this guy's got her shit together. We should bring her inside and have her help with the team at a bigger level instead of all this little things you were doing. I was a motion designer, mostly for documentary for a long time and I got really into writing my own scripts and extensions and make, I used to say I like to make After Effects do stuff it wasn't supposed to do. And now it's my job to help make it do those things. Okay, so what are some of the new things you said, you know, luckily we're past the official release date. You can actually talk about things. So what are some of the new things? So we have a great new release, just came out last week, last Wednesday. We're super proud of it. It's available now to anyone who has a Creative Cloud subscription. And big thing, and this is across After Effects and Premiere is a new thing called the Essential Graphics Panel. It allows you to make really elaborate, anything you want to do in After Effects you can go fully advanced motion graphics and then choose the properties you want an editor to be able to change. So I can say, I'm designing something but it's on brand, I don't want you to change the color but you can change the text. You can reposition something on screen, we can change the background color, do all of those kind of things. And I can have those controls in After Effects and when I save this as a motion graphics template, gets packed up and someone can use it in Premiere and change those things live in the timeline with no rendering. It's really interesting just the whole collaboration, you know, kind of aspect. It used to be so much, you know, an individual sitting down on their, on their hopefully very big machine with a lot of memory and compute, you know, working on Adobe. But now it's really more of a collaborate effort. It's not a lot of people just working independently all by themselves on the machine, especially with cloud and some of these really higher performance applications. Yeah, it's actually been really interesting to watch what's happening. We have a beta service called Team Projects and I've been doing press demos where I'm in Seattle and one of my colleagues is in Germany and we're collaborating live on the same project. I'm in After Effects, he's in Premiere, I make a change, it shows up right in his timeline. He doesn't even have to open After Effects, doesn't have to import anything. And it's all really seamless and we've actually, we've all been collaborating the whole time, but now you can do it without all those extra steps of rendering and sending a file and downloading the file and importing it and then adding it. Now that all can just happen in one click. It's like Google Docs versus Word, right? You have to save and attach the file and send hopefully you remember to save the file. All right, and the other thing you're really excited about is Character Animator. Yes. So what's going on there? So for people who don't know, Character Animator is a new application from the original creators of After Effects. It's a separate application that allows you to do real-time live animation using your webcam and your microphone and also even just touch screen, keyboard, mouse. Basically, hardware you already have to power a character that starts out as a Photoshop or Illustrator file and Character Animator brings it to life. We've seen some really amazing stuff people are doing with it. So real-time live animation. So that seems like completely impossible because back in the day, that's all we would hear about is you had to render, render, render, render, render to get this animation stuff going. But now you're saying you've got it broken down to a level, you can do it live. There's this great line from The Simpsons that animation is rarely done live. It's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists. And we're working to change that. It's a lot of fun. And it also just, you look at the screen and your character looks back at you. It's this really amazing experience working in it. And we've been working to make it easier to use, easier to get started. We've added work spaces so now it actually walks you through the process of getting characters set up and rigged and then a different space for performing. But it's, character animation is just fun. And then now you're bolting that on to all these various live video distribution services. We've added Mercury Transmit support, which means that you can go out to broadcast hardware. You can connect to apps that stream to Facebook live, YouTube live. We're seeing things like Stephen Colbert's, the late show, they use Character Animator to do Cartoon Trump and he's improving live with a cartoon character. And it's all happening in real time. So as you look back, I mean, this is all fascinating and it's great now you have the power of the whole company to kind of make many of your visions come true. Where does it go next? It just seems like the creative opportunity or the tools for the creator are just exploding. I think there's a lot of cool stuff we can do, but for me, one of the biggest things is anything we can do to save people time and to save people doing the boring stuff, I want to give people more space to create. So don't have to think about versioning, you don't have to think about all those outputs, but all the stuff about, get that out of the way, get the data entry out of the way so you can actually focus on the stuff you really want to be doing. And what about 360 and VR and all those crazy new technologies that are all over these halls? Everywhere here. Premiere's spent some really cool stuff this release. They've got Ambisonic Audio so that you can actually do VR 360 footage and the sound comes from the right place in the shot. So Ambisonic Audio? Ambisonic Audio. So there's some really cool stuff happening there and then on the After Effects side we have some amazing partners who have been doing super cool stuff with VR. Their tools are really evolving and it's a really nice seamless workflow working with them. Where does it go next? Anywhere. Anywhere, really. No, it's just amazing how, again, these tools that really put everything in the power of basically anybody's hands. It's kind of this whole democratization theme which we continue to hear over and over again. We've really focused a lot on trying to get just the tools you need right now to get you most of the way there, super simple. And then when you need to go deep, you can go deep. We're not limiting you to the simple tools but everything's right in context, right in front of you. The stuff you change the most is right there and then when you need to go in and tweak and get to that pro level it's another step down. And so we're trying to really build that kind of workflow so that you have sound and graphics and color all right in the edit and then you have the big pro apps for when you need to do the fancy stuff. The heavy lifting. The heavy lifting. And I wonder, Victoria, you talked about the community because Adobe's got a really active community. You guys have a huge show that brings everybody together. You obviously came out of that community into the mothership. How important is this kind of an active community around the creative process tools you mentioned? You even wrote your own scripts. It's, I love the After Effects community in particular. It's, they're my friends. And a show like this, I see people. I have really great friends that I only see once or twice a year at these kind of shows but it's such a great strong global community that we stay in touch throughout the year and our users really drive where we're going with things. A lot of the features in this release of After Effects I can tell you by name who's been asking for them for years and who's super excited to see something in there. Okay. So if I see you again in 2018, can you give us a hint as to maybe what we'll see? Don't get in trouble. I might get in trouble. Okay, we've got some really cool stuff underway. All right, well we'll keep an eye and you guys over on the table, you gotta learn how to do this talking creative animator thing. I can think of some people that we might wanna gen up. Not the real Donald Trump but some other people. All right, Victoria, well thanks for spending a few minutes with us and again, congrats on the new release. Thank you, it's really great to be here. All right, Victoria Nies, I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. Thanks for watching.