San Francisco on Thursday

My sister and I ventured into San Francisco today, to attend Adobe's seminar on "optimizing and delivering video for the web using Flash Professional 8". I don't usually attend 4-hour seminars held in the city, but the title of the seminar seemed advanced enough that I wouldn't be rendered unconcious by newbie questions from the audience like what the difference between vector graphics and rendered graphics are, or how to create a layer in Flash. At least that was my hope, because otherwise I had just wasted a trip up to San Francisco and some amount of money for parking.

The first hour of so was a thinly veiled attempt at mind-numbing the audience into submission by marketing presentation. It was no so surprising to me that at the end of the marketing portion of the segment, and had just started the basics of technical information. When we had our break for refreshments, that a healthy portion of the audience did not return. Which is too bad for them, because the second half of the seminar was much more interesting and informative in regards to the tricks and tips of how to use Flash 8 to deliver video content.

You can do some interesting stuff with Flash 8, but the overall feel of the presentation was that Flash was just a step in the Adobe workflow process for video, and not a fully standalone product for video -- Premiere and AfterEffects seemed to be a vital part of the presentation -- Flash 8 was just the one product that pulls all the video content together.