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Reshaping Workflows with Dell Pro Precision and NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs
Pushing Creative Limits with Adobe, Dell & AI ft. A.J. Bleyer
00:35:01
Filmmaker A.J. Bleyer on Adobe, AI, and Dell hardware powering faster, more creative workflows in today’s filmmaking landscape.
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Welcome to Reshaping Workflows with dell Pro Max PCs and Nvidia, where innovation meets real world impact in high performance computing.
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A
Welcome back to another episode of Reshaping Workflows. I'm your host, Logan Lawler. I've got Cindy here. Fantastic. But that's not why you're here to listen. You're to hear about different workflows and today we have maybe one of the best when it comes to Adobe. We have AJ with us. So AJ take a second. Well, one, thank you for coming and to take a second, kind of give, you know, the 30 second elevator pitch a little bit on your background, you know what you do and what kind of tools you use. I mean you don't have to list them all, but what are the main ones that we're going to talk about today?
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C
Sure, sure. Well, thanks for having me on and gosh. Hello everyone. My name is AJ Blier. I'm a DJ director and I special in doing a lot of action commercials. I jump out airplanes a lot. We do a lot of stuff with race cars, helicopters, pyrotechnics, as I kind of joke, anything that kind of freaks out my parents a little bit. And I have been using Adobe for a long time. I'm a bit of a technologist by trade. I worked with computers kind of growing up and started as an editor and then didn't really have that many friends that wanted to shoot videos like I did. And when you start shooting stuff for your own videos, you kind of realize that is directing and kind of slowly made the transition from editing to directing, but still have my hands pretty deep in both. I become attached at the hip with Adobe's workflow. So I use Lightroom, I use Photoshop, and obviously of course Premiere for all my video editing and I love it.
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A
Fantastic. So I think before and Cindy will probably lead a lot of this episode because it is all M and E and apparently I don't know Adobe well enough to be in the booth to speak on it and at Adobe Max. But that's neither here or there. But let's go ahead and key up. You mentioned that you have kind of a 60 second director's kind of reel cut. Before we dive into that clip, can you give just kind of a high level of what are going to see in the video?
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C
Sure, yeah. You know, it's funny, there's a lot of different ways to make videos these days and more camera options than ever. Rather than kind of explain to someone the kind of style that I have as a director I often will just show them a video that looks a lot like this.
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A
Roll the clip. So, aj awesome clip. Well beyond my skill set. I'm impressed, but I. I don't. I can't do any of this creative stuff. So. Cindy, you're the Adobe expert, but.
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B
Yeah. So, A.J. how did you, like, you know, did you always know you wanted to get into this industry? Like, what, you know, what was your journey to this point?
- [02:38]
C
Oh, man. Well, I. Boy. Okay, so I grew up, and I was particularly unacademic. It sounds really romantic looking back, but I would spend all of my time in high school. I just love making. Making videos. I started by learning the hard way that I wasn't cut out to be a pro skateboarder like the rest of my friends. And then we kind of transitioned from middle school to high school, from skateboards to cars. And then I got really into cars, like, a big way. I kind of discovered the TV show Top Gear and would spend a lot of time with my friends trying to recreate that show with a little Honda Civics and stuff. And I loved it. I loved it so much. I got so into it that I really started to spend every week, night and weekend, all my free time doing this, and it was really fun. But I really blew off my school in a big way. When it came time to. To graduate, kind of caught up to me in a. In a less romantic way. And I applied to every film school on the planet and did not get in. It sucked. I did not get into a single college. So with that, it kind of had a. Had a real ego death at about 18 years old and got a. Got a retail job and. And it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me because I. I was. I really had this life plan, like, I'm going to be a filmmaker and go to film school and do that whole thing. And once that went out the window, I just kind of got a job and just figured, well, if I'm not going to be, like, a successful person, I might as well just spend all of my free time just doing the stuff I love doing. So I dove in unapologetically to my hobby and spent so much time doing that that I ended up getting kind of decent at it. Probably more time than I would have spent on it had I been balancing it with the traditional academic path. And then YouTube comes out, and I thought I'd be cool to. There's no business plan to any of it, but I was like, it'd be cool to at least get some comments on this stuff. So I started posting some videos online, got rather lucky and a few of them did well. Gave me some attention from my local car community, including some some small business owners started doing video work for dealerships. And then that got the attention eventually of fancy car brands and slowly started breaking even with my resale job. Enough that I decided to 23, I didn't know anything about anything. I quit my retail job and just decided I was going to try being a filmmaker full time.
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B
I love that. And we've all had our stint in retail. So what is, what I love about this industry is as everyone is very loyal to their software. So you've been, you know, really close with Adobe. What does your, what, what's the workflow look like? What softwares are you using? You mentioned, you know, creative cloud, what else? Tell me about After Effects. Substance.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. So it's interesting. For a long time I was doing kind of event video work, as so many people do, cutting my teeth on that. And I always had aspirations of doing bigger projects. I would pass these big, big shoots, you know, that messed up parking for like neighborhoods at a time. And I was like, oh my God, I want to get into that stuff. And as I slowly have transitioned into kind of doing these larger, sometimes 100 plus crew productions, it's amazing how everything from the bottom to the top begins to scale up. That started at first with crew numbers and lighting and then obviously camera systems. And one of the things that you learn very quickly as you're shooting on these cinema cameras, especially shooting high frame rate stuff, or 8K stuff, is the hard drive space and the technical burden of what you're doing in both writing and reading media. But also to your dit, it just begins to go up exponentially to the point where suddenly I'm talking about terabytes, suddenly I'm talking about RAID arrays. Suddenly I need to get machines that are specked out to the absolute max. Not because it's like the most fun way to spend money for me, but because it's a true professional necessity. And to have anything less than that is just going to be time spent. I remember forever when I started shooting on these bigger systems that I was originally a little bit late to upgrade my machine. And one day you have to leave with all the footage out of the camera and on, on your hard drives, right? And at the end of the day I was waiting to dump footage and it just was not going fast enough to the point where we're done and then the sun is setting and then the crew is leaving and then we're talking about maybe postmating some pizza. And it just ended up really being such a delay even to my client where I was like, okay, I can't have this be the bottleneck. And as you start upgrading your technology solutions throughout production, sometimes you're going for a higher fidelity or sometimes that greater frame rate or something, but sometimes really just the most valuable asset of kind of technologically advancing is just time saved. And on production where everything does get so expensive so quickly, that ends up becoming a really important value proposition really, really fast. So I been using Premiere for a long time in Adobe and Photoshop. I have messed around in After Effects a little bit. I have slowly learned as I try to do things that are kind of at a broadcast level quality that I can. I know After Effects enough to drop a couple terms and earn the respect of my artist or do an unrealistic red bouncing ball kind of decently. But once you realize that I do work with a lot of more talented After Effects artists and people that can do what I do at a bigger level. But I still love to do all the edits myself as much as I can. I'm pretty into that.
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B
So I'm sure. And without naming brands you've worked on other products, what are you most excited about working, you know, on with the new Dell Tower that we're about to send you? And what would you say is the importance of having a dedicated GPU for some of these softwares?
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C
Well, a lot of these new cameras shoot 4K 42210 bit footage and, and that's a codec that is really heavy to play back. It's just, it's very CPU bound. And in, in the past what you have to do is you have to get these massive files and you have to transcode them. You have to do proxy creation, you know, and, and sometimes even play back your, your footage at half resolution. And it's a really annoying thing when you're trying to paint a picture as an artist to, to be bound to wait almost to take the paint out of the paint tube or to almost paint your painting at like a reduced resolution and when you finish it, it'll be at twice the quality. These little things. I mean it's amazing how technology doesn't always iterate all at once. I remember like for example, the sensors on cameras now we can do 12K. And that's kind of people are saying about equal to human eye resolution, but like screens are too expensive for that. Hard drives are getting really good at capacity but to upload and download data is still in the stone ages comparatively. And oftentimes when you're working with these massive files, you begin to feel the bottleneck become your CPU and oftentimes your GPU and to wait to render. I will remember that in the early days of editing when you would render something that was a hands off process on the computer, like you can do anything else in the editing software and just kind of wait for it to process what you had done, it was brutal. And once they found a way to allow things to render and you could still work around it, it just creatively was like taking off ankle weights. I have been feeling lately that as these computers or as these cameras begin to create, you know, bigger and richer files, even GoPros are starting to make these amazing high quality files. The, the hardware that I've been working with has been a little bit of those ankle weights coming back on. I love to go fast in everything that I do. It's kind of my whole personality and to get slowed down physically or technologically kind of sucks. And I'm, I'm really excited because these new Nvidia chips and, and this, this new Blackwell machine, it, the specs are unbelievable and I'm really excited to just be able to churn through this footage and just get faster to the painting that I like to do as an.
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A
Artist, which I love. I mean, so. And that's the thing is that we won't mention, you know, the other oem, but one of them, you know, has natively kind of a 4, 22 encode decode which really like AJ you were describing is allowing that, that video natively to be able to process very, very quickly. Up until this release of, you know, the Nvidia RTX Pro cards 422 was not native kind of within the GPU. And that's right.
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C
This is processed locally on the RTX Pro, right? Correct.
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A
They lives natively in the GPU where the speed of the ENCODE decode that you were getting from the company we will not name is now that's no longer an advantage where a lot of people gravitated to that because I get it right, Like, I mean, I hate lagging stuff, takes forever, you know, whatever. But now with Blackwell that is completely solved and plus you know, other things that you can do with it. But that is a huge advantage of Blackwell. Outside of the AI, outside of the Tensor Quartz, outside of everything. I think people kind of, I mean, aren't really talking about a whole lot and if you're an M and E, you're using Photoshop, you're. Well, specifically Premiere Pro doing stuff with video, it's, it's a huge advantage.
- [11:12]
C
It's absolutely true. And as a, as someone who's a pro end user of both hardware and of machine, just even, you know, cameras, everything, everything like that, it's interesting. I, I can acknowledge that for a lot of technology companies I am not the majority customer. Right. I, I am sitting kind of at the top and not because I like to, to flex my GPUs on people though. I'm not mad about it. But it isn't, it really is as, as I've said before, like a professional necessity. Like it sucks if you don't have hardware that's optimized for the super intensive graphics processing intensive work that we do. And in, in recognizing that I am not the majority customer, you often see a lot of innovations in hardware just be tailored for the masses. And you see that in software too. I mean I will say that like I, I will mention this like I was at a time a Final Cut person and it lost its way because it started just getting very consumery. I discovered Premiere and it was just the answer to all of my questions. It allowed me to create work at the fidelity that I wanted it to be at and it really helped me grow as an artist and it made me really appreciate brands like Adobe that really are centered around the pro user. I wish more hardware companies were as tailored to pro hardware users as I feel Adobe is for software. It's part of the reason I love that company so much. And the Blackwell and the Nvidia RTX Pro. This gpu, it does feel again, kind of like a focused hardware solution to my problems as a high end creative user. It's one of the reasons I'm really excited to get my hands on the machine.
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B
Yeah, we're excited to send it to you.
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A
Yeah, but that's assuming Cindy does what she says she's going to do. So you need to watch out, buddy.
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B
We've got an entire campaign just built around AJ Getty and his new tower and we're, yeah, we're excited about it.
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C
I am so excited. I will say this. It's, that is, it's a special moment for me. I even working with Adobe in this way, like I was someone who is a self taught creative and I'll tell you, being a professional creative, kind of a weird gig because if people like the word, it's kind of vulnerable. You're just saying this is my stylistic preference. On things. I suppose this is true for any art. And if your phone rings, you're like, yeah, I'm a creative genius. And if it doesn't ring, you go, I suck. And I should just get. Maybe my sensibilities are off. I Learned Premiere One YouTube tutorial at a time, the same way that I learned Photoshop. And I thought I liked the work that I was beginning to produce out of it. But every time you advance in that software and you look up a new tutorial, you go, oh my God, great, I know how to do that. And then you think about the person giving that tutorial and you go, oh my God. I just. I don't know anything. Like, I. It's both inspiring, confidence wise, and humbling at the same exact time. And step by step by step. I just learned it one tutorial at the time and I kind of felt like I was hacking my way through it and I kind of knew how to do what I do. But boy, there are some. There are some living encyclopedias when it comes to software knowledge. To be endorsed by that company and to have a chance to represent it as an artist is really meaningful. And I absolutely extend that same feeling to Dell and to this hardware. It takes just an almost unfathomable amount of research in R and D to bring something to market in general in hardware. People don't realize. I mean, it's like hardware, except with all the joys of supply chain stuff. And then on top of that, if you're trying to push the envelope in a hardware way, it's just an even bigger push across the board. So to have the privilege of being able to use these machines, to be alive at this time in history, I think is really exciting for hardware. And then just also to be on the podcast we work with. I'm stoked. This is a great time for me. I'm so happy.
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B
Excitement is infectious. I love that. So I want to talk about AI a little bit. And I know Adobe kind of was the trailblazer in starting to integrate AI into their software. As you know, you had text to texture and subsense, you had, you know, text based editing in Premiere. How do you keep up with all of the software advancements and are you leveraging those features in the tool sets?
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C
1,000%. And I want to shake every person that's not exploring AI in either hardware or software by the shoulders and really tell them respectfully to just kind of wake up. The best analogy I can make, and I often start with this before I just talk about the benefits of AI from an objective perspective, because the benefits are there. You don't have to take my word for it. I remember my first camera ever was a Canon Rebel. It's a little DSLR camera and I love that thing. And it was my first camera that was like a professional camera, meaning like the lens could get exchanged. It wasn't my. My home Handycam and I love that thing. But I remember getting a lot of flack from people at that time because it was right at the advent of digital photography. And I, to be honest, do not know my way around a dark room. I know Photoshop really well and I know that the processes in Photoshop, like Dodge and Burn, are inspired by darkroom stuff. I'm also not knocking film. I think there's a beautiful quality that's unique to film. I like stuff done on film, but I just. I never had to learn it. And I threw myself into being kind of a digital technologist and I got a lot of flack for this. And I remember just not caring because these were the tools I had at the time. And I. It didn't feel that relevant then and I wanted to invest in the way things were going. And looking back, I see a lot of friends of mine, very talented friends of mine, who just were ostriching a little bit, putting their head in the sand, relate to that jump, because it is unsettling. As an artist, you kind of figure out your secret sauce, your own process, and then to unravel that with innovations in technology, it's. It is uncomfortable, but it is also kind of a constant. And they ended up having to play catch up a little bit. The moment I saw what Adobe was doing in AI, I remember we had like a lunch and it was shown to me. And then I woke up the next day because my head was just spinning and I was. It was so apparent to me once again that this is the direction things were going. And I could look at it from one of two angles. As a creative storyteller, it's incredibly exciting. It empowers me to do stuff I could have never done before. As a creative process, it is objectively unsettling. But things will continue to innovate in 10 years from now. Kids these days or kids in the future are going to be using these AI solutions and hardware and software. They won't be thinking about what was. And I decided as an artist, I wanted to be relevant. I wanted to be at the helm. And I don't know where AI is going. I think we all kind of agree in some Respects it's kind of in its, its puberty phase. Like it's just innovating so quickly. We, we are all exploring it together, but the innovations are starting to go from interesting to, to exponential and it's, it's really getting to get exciting. I, I've started to use AI in a number of different ways. And I think what's really important to people out there is not necessarily to throw away your process in exchange for AI, but to have an awareness of all the AI solutions out there and then to plug in the solutions that supplement what you do. There's a ton of ways to use AI out there, and I have taken it upon myself to be relatively familiar with all of them. I'd say in my professional workflow, I use AI maybe 30 to 40%. I wouldn't say it's the majority of what I do throughout now, but I'm 30 to 40% more efficient and creative and evolved as an artist. And I think that's a really meaningful figure. And it's just getting very, very exciting. Obviously the updates with AI have come to software first and are now beginning to trickle down into hardware, but the promised land is coming close. And, and I think hardware is really interesting because in a way, I feel similar to hardware as I do as a photo editor. If you do your job as a photo editor, you almost don't even notice it's there. It's kind of like a silent partner for you. It's not really interrupting your. Your way that you take in a photo. In fact, if you notice that it's there, then it's probably not the best retouched image. It's a lot of work and energy and creativity that goes into developing these hardware solutions. But it should hold your hand and allow you to do your thing more effortlessly than it should be something that you have to navigate.
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B
Going and looking at your portfolio. Is there anything that you wish you could go back and redo, like having the tools that you have today?
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C
Yeah, there's so many. Are you kidding me? That's like what makes this so exciting. One of the things that I was a big revelation for me is I would look at the work I was doing, which felt and I couldn't put my finger on it. Kind of pro, amateur, kind of prosumer y in terms of its fidelity. For a while I felt stuck at that tier. And then I would look at like the photo, for example, the photos or something I was shooting of a car on the street. And then I'd look at these magazine covers. And for the life of me, I was like, what is the difference? Why does that look like a nice, clean, cohesive piece of art? And why does mine look like a photo of a car on the street? And as my eyes become more discerning, I've realized it's really about taking the time to clean up all those imperfections in everything that you do. Cleaning up the telephone poles and the person walking in the background and that in that crack in the ground and that ugly reflection in the side of a vehicle and all that stuff. And the first time I found an image that I knew is pretty good in camera, and I just spent days making it, just taking out everything I could imagine. I remember I went to the bathroom and I looked back at my monitor and I was like, there it is. That's the difference. It gets really difficult to do that though. It's very time intensive. And as, as a compositor and as I would consider myself a pretty advanced editor, it just takes a lot of time and a lot of carpal tunnel. Frankly, it's even harder when you go into video because you now have this z axis movement and it takes advanced visual effect. I would love to have advanced visual effects at my fingertips. But I remember as a director and as a cinematographer and as a video editor, as soon as I saw the amount of focus and energy needed to really become a top tier visual creative, it just felt like I would need to have like a severance, like separate life to invest fully into that skill set and get myself capable of it. Now, knowing that I have not all of, but a lot of what would have been advanced visual techniques at my fingertips, it doesn't just make the videos more polished, it doesn't just make the editing more fun. It actually begins to affect the way I creatively approach new concepts because I now have more things available. So I look at a lot of the old projects I did where I wish I could clean stuff out or take out a distracting person, or extend a clip a couple seconds longer than I actually felt filmed for, have a sound effect that I didn't have access to in the time. And to be able to now do all of that myself. I now not only look at my old projects and I do mess around with some of them just to see what's possible. I also, when I get new creative in, I'm able to spend less time cleaning up an exit sign by a doorway that would take someone on a ladder and a bunch of tape to kind of make it disappear. When I just know I have the Skills to Greek that out or make it disappear in editing, which is a couple clicks.
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B
That's so cool. And how do you feel like, you know, as a filmmaker and as a director about some of the tools? You know, people are creating content now and editing like on their phones. And you know, I'm, I'm not a creative person. So for me that stuff looks really good. So can you always kind of tell or what are your thoughts on that? Is that something that, you know, you're afraid of, where it's just getting better and better? You know, how do you navigate that?
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C
No, it's, it is interesting. I feel like I'm, I'm answering a lot of your direct questions with like an ethereal kind of like, let's rewind 15 years. One of the things I learned when I was doing tech support professionally, which I did many years after high school, is when people would come to me with their hardware or software problems. There was always a different energy that I would find one of two. Sometimes I'd find people, sometimes younger people saying, ah, this phone's all messed up, this computer's messed up. I hate these problems. Oh, fix it for me. And sometimes I'd get people, sometimes older people coming in and saying, hey, how do I, I'm not using this correctly. How do I understand it correctly? And I just remember the cool factor being so different between those two people. And I made a promise to myself when I was at that age that, you know, I don't have to listen to whatever the current music trends are or dress in that way. But I'm really going to try to be careful to not be just like a naysayer of the way things are going and explore and be an active participant on that ride. A lot of people are shooting visually or vertically now and I, I respect it because it is, you know, we have always shot and captured content for the way it's consumed. You know, we were shooting when our screens got bigger, we were able to shoot at higher resolution. And now that we are consuming content, shorter form that now we're shooting shorter form ads. And if people are consuming it on their phones, then we're shooting vertically now. And I, I think the best kind of content out there is stuff that you actually get out and make and stuff that people are watching. And it would be kind of silly for me to really poo poo new age short form vertical content when the reality is that's probably the majority of the kind of content that I consume when I'm doom scrolling at 2:00am you know, so I'm, I'm part of that as well. I will say I'm in the sport of I like as an artist. What's exciting to me is creating the absolute most refined, polished visuals I can. That's, that's just what gets me outta bed every day. I used to be kind of a volume shooter, especially in the event world and shooting cars, just getting as much stuff as I could. Now what's really exciting to me is those days where you're able to spend all day on a beer pour and be like, didn't get it. You know, just that absolute ocd. I'm being a little hyperbolic, but like just really refining, refining. But what that takes is, is two things. It takes, it takes time to just dial something in and not be rushed, but it also takes really high end tools to capture stuff that is at the, at the highest level. Cameras these days are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And I am incredibly impressed at the small and handheld and slowly becoming more affordable form factors that these massive cameras are able to do. I've seen like FX3s, just cameras that are able to do 10 bit, 4, 2, 2. And I go, that is unbelievable. But the only thing that isn't getting smaller are the file sizes. The data that I'm wrangling remains the same even if the opportunities and the price points that I have to capture that kind of data are becoming more accessible. And on the contrary, when I max out a brand new GoPro Hero Black, like we did a, we did a commercial, we were kind of doing a live race between some pro video game players. There is a, there's a website called Type Racer and you can learn how to type on it. And it's an active race online where you get a sentence and the first person to type out this phrase correctly, their car goes across the line, almost like, kind of like a county fair game and you win. And we wanted to do that for real. So with some professional video game players in a race car on a track and if they messed up, you hit the brakes and if you get it right, you're going. And it was kind of a fun challenge. When you're doing these kind of experiential ads and I have some, some clips of it here that I'll, I can, I can show in the, in the podcast as well. When you, when you do experiential stuff, you kind of have a different approach. It's not one big camera, often like a movie might be. It's about coverage because you're doing a live event. So I have GoPros rigged everywhere. Inside the car, outside the car, on a camera car, outside, people on the sidelines. And when you get that kind of footage back to your desk, I'm not dealing with one, you know, day's worth of footage of four, two, two, ten bit. I'm dealing with like seven or eight. I also just finished my first little mini documentary which I'm really excited to release. And that was days and days of a ton of camera work. Now what's cool is that one of the big efficiencies we're getting out of AI and out of Adobe Premiere are smarter ways to organize and look through and find all that footage. Things like text based editing, as you mentioned. If I'm looking for that shot where he talks about the red balloon, I can search red balloon. And kind of similar to your smartphone now, it will pull up that media. That's awesome. But all the AI software efficiencies in the world to organize and wrangle your footage doesn't make your ingesting and you're editing and you're rendering and you're exporting that much faster. So now that all these cameras even like, you know, the new, the new iPhone shoots prores, I can now bring in all this footage from a myriad of different camera providers and I can mix red with Sony with, with mobile footage, GoPro. And from what I understand this, this new, this new Blackwell, you know, line, it's just going to be able to process it all right there and just make it nothing.
- [28:25]
A
Exactly.
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B
So quiet again.
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A
I know.
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B
Well, we've like shut him up.
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C
This is amazing. This is going to be the ratio.
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A
Of talking, just talking, just talking, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. All right, so we're getting kind of up against it. Let me ask one quick question and I'm, I'm curious. Is that what AI tool that's embedded natively into Adobe? Whichever Adobe product. Doesn't matter. That when you first used it, the one that was just like, oh my God, I didn't know that I needed this. But now that I got it, I never want to let it go. Kind of like me and Cindy's friendship.
- [29:02]
C
Without question. The first time I experienced generative AI in Photoshop and it's starting to come to premiere now in a more meaningful way. I'm split between those two programs. But it's nuts what you can do in Photoshop. And I remember the generative AI tool when it first came out, that was kind of the first big heavy hitter In I think, the genai space as a whole, the clouds opened up and I suddenly was like, oh, my God. And I saw the vision. I am used to combining a lot of images together. I'm used to trying to find an image online that I can use to paint or copy a texture onto things. I consider myself a pretty advanced compositor. I can make most things look rather photorealistic if it's a concept I have, but it just takes time. It takes so much time that I often will have maybe concepts in my head I'd like to do that just aren't worth the effort to execute because it really. To make it perfect at a quality and a finish that's I. I like to do. It just would take too much time and to circle something and to have your vision in there and have it pop out and just be there, not only a nice blend, but a texture. It became suddenly I first, oh, can I remove this and this and this and this and this? Click. Does it. And I go, well, could I do. Could I add something in? Does it? And it just served to me as a really great metaphor of I need to start thinking a lot bigger. At the creative inception of my process, a great example that I had, and I think I have a clip of this as well that I can. I can show. I had this idea and I wanted to make sure that it would. It would work. I went to Santa Monica beach and I put my camera on a tripod in the sand, and I set it up just looking at the sand. And I had myself crawling on my stomach, exhausted through the sand behind me. Pch, cars, surfers, palm trees. But what I did is I wanted to make sure that that was kind of in the back horizon. I took that, that static shot. I selected everything and replaced it with a. I gave it a prompt view of distant desert sand dunes on the horizon. And it not only created that for me, but the way it blends and matches lighting into the rest of your frame. Suddenly it looked like I was just in the middle of the Sahara Desert crawling on my stomach. And then even further. I took that and I just said, expand it. Make it bigger. Like, make me smaller in the frame. And suddenly I had this massive desert expanse. As a producer, if I wanted to get that shot, that would have been a day we would have to drive to a location not talking about permitting or water or safety or travel time, any of that stuff. And I just did it for free in a public location with my own camera and a tripod. So those generative AI, I think, is going to create a whole new generation of probably the best storytellers that we've ever had as humanity, because they're now not encumbered by the technological gate of learning, all that creative. But they have your hardware and they have this amazing software and it's kind of whatever they can dream up.
- [32:10]
A
So what I like to do, we're kind of getting up again. So what I like to do to close it out is pretend that, you know, someone just completely flaked, didn't watch any of this episode. Give us 30 seconds to a minute of what you would say are the biggest takeaways from the episode for you that you would want someone to walk away with.
- [32:28]
C
I think as a creative advancements in your secret sauce, in your process can sometimes be a little intimidating, but they can also carry the tools to really elevate your craft in an amazing way. And I think great artists are always creating and they're more excited about the opportunities to create than they are about losing whatever kind of footing they have or making everything perfect. Every once in a while, a big technological advancement comes out, like the advent of the Internet or even digital cameras. And I think with AI, both in hardware and software, we're living in a really special moment in time where more opportunities are available to me as a digital artist than ever before. And I'm really excited to see what's possible with this new hardware solution.
- [33:11]
A
I love it. So tell everyone. I mean, we'll put it in the show notes, but where can people find you on social media if they want to check you out or your website?
- [33:19]
C
Ah, thank you so much for listening to the sultry baritone of my voice for this long. If you want to listen to it more for some reason or see some of my work, you can find me on my website. AJ blyer.com b l e Y E R I'm also on Instagram by that same name. And thank you so much for listening, of course.
- [33:34]
A
Well, Cindy, thank you for being partner in crime once again. And I, I love this episode for.
- [33:40]
C
A lot of reasons.
- [33:40]
A
One other than AJ was like fantastic to talk to, but is being able to, as a creative, see that there are a lot of things built in, not, you know, standalone tools necessarily, but that are built into your workflows ultimately with Adobe, like the example AJ gave about being able to insert sand dunes with perfect kind of creative. But look, feel, texture, like you were actually there. And you're right, it is going to open up kind of the world at the end of the day for people who might not have millions of dollars of funding or super great legal team to be able to go out and secure locations. It's going to open up a world of creatives that are going to be able to tell stories that we've never seen. And with that, this is reshaping workflows with Dell Pro Max and Nvidia RTX GPUs. Until the next one, keep your AI and Adobe workflows running locally and we'll see you on the next one.
- [34:40]
C
Do what you want, do what you want, do what you want. This podcast was produced in partnership with Amaze Media Labs.