I had a great time at the Video 08 conference in Orlando last week. This was my first time attending so I wasn’t sure what to expect. As best I can tell they had about 350-400 people in attendance during the week, although I heard they told exhibitors they were expecting 750. I’d guess about 250-300 people made it into the tradeshow. I got to speak in the Adobe booth along with my good buddy and Master Demo Presenter Steve Whatley (shown here pointing the way to San Jose).

The tradeshow took place in one of the ballrooms at the Wyndham Orlando Resort so all of the booths were either 10×10 or 10×20 in size. Adobe had a simple 10×20 booth with a projector and a screen. Steve and I took turns doing demos from his laptop while people stood and watched. It would have been nice if booth visitors could have sat down while they watched the demos, but it wasn’t to bad as it was. Because Steve had demo files for all of the CS3 apps, and he had worked with them before, he did all of the demo presentations for some of the major new features in CS3 PP. Things like:

• Time Remap in Premiere Pro
• Time Warp in Premiere Pro
• Quick automated slideshows in Encore
• Encore projects direct to Blu-ray
• Encore projects to a full Flash website in one click
• and many more

Here’s a picture that Steve took of me while I was demoing. My demos focused specifically on educating people on the fact that Photoshop can now work directly with video files. Most attendees had absolutely no idea this was possible and a few even thought I was just plain teasing them or that I was talking about bringing a video clip into PS as a filmstrip file. This shocked me… so I proceeded to blow their minds by:

• color correcting video in realtime
• creating custom Black&White video conversions in realtime
• performing selective color painting effects in realtime
• turning timelapse still pictures into gorgeous HD video
• animating layer masks for cool effects
• color change of objects in video without any rotoscoping
• create amazing alpha channels with the gradient tool
• create a complete After Effects project… but all in Photoshop CS3 Extended
• and so on…

Throughout the 2 days that the tradeshow floor was opened I answered what seemed like hundreds of questions. Some were very specific how-to and tips&tricks type questions concerning the various apps that ship in CS3 Production Premium. Other questions were from people interested in switching from their current NLE of choice (Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas, and various AVID) to Premiere Pro and they wanted to make sure that they could either continue their current workflow or that their favorite feature was also present in Premiere Pro.

I’m currently at the WEVA Winter conference teaching some great people, who are also very eager students, in fully packed classrooms. Hopefully I’ll get some shots and some good stories to share with you next week. Till then…

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