Annenberg showcases Adobe Creative Cloud

The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism hosted “Adobe Days: Think and Drinks Introduction to the Adobe Creative Cloud” on Tuesday. Several Adobe officials spoke with students and faculty about the new features in the new subscription service that offers all Adobe software to users.

 

The event was one of several during “Adobe Days” at Annenberg this week. “Adobe Days” began with a discussion and presentation on Nov. 11 by SoulPancake, a Los Angeles-based startup known primarily for its YouTube channel. The discussion presented Adobe Creative Cloud and all of the new features and web programs associated with it.

The Adobe representatives spoke of hardware requirements and recommendations for running Adobe software.

“Today’s standard is 8 gigabytes of RAM. Memory is really important,” said Sebastian DiStefano, a business development manager of video products for higher education at Adobe. “Using a solid state drive will make your computer and Adobe software run blazingly fast.”

Adobe representatives also spoke of USC-specific features such as the tutorials for all the programs in the Adobe Suite on Lynda.com, a free service for all USC students and faculty accessible from the USC Information Technology Services website.

Representatives emphasized the integration between various Adobe programs that allow nearly seamless editing between each program in the Adobe Creative Cloud. “You don’t work in siloed environments anymore,” DiStefano said. “You work in applications that communicate with each other.”

The event also showcased Behance, an online platform and community that is integrated with Creative Cloud and that serves as a place for artists and designers to showcase portfolios.

Students said they appreciated the tutorial events on the new software.

“It’s nice that Annenberg is hosting this event and really cool that Adobe could come over to show us all these new features,” said Gabrielle Nguyen Hurst, a freshman majoring in interactive entertainment.

The “Think and Drinks” workshop showed students and faculty some of the new features that were recently added to the Adobe Creative Cloud. More than 150 updates were added to the Adobe software suite on Halloween. DiStefano demonstrated how to edit videos using Photoshop, how to create interactive documents with InDesign and how to use the spot healing tool to edit out unwanted sounds in Audition using the spectral audio view. He also demonstrated how Adobe had added audio codecs for YouTube and Vimeo to Photoshop and Premiere Pro, which contained metadata that ensured the video sharing sites did not recode the video format, resulting in faster upload times and a better, more realistic editing software.

“I like the new features and like being able to save to the cloud,” said Sherveen Uduwana, a freshman majoring in interactive entertainment. “It’s very interesting and it’s awesome that students get Creative Cloud and somebody to teach them how to use it as well.”

Faculty and students also enjoyed refreshments from the future Annenberg Café that will be housed in the Wallis Annenberg Hall, which is currently under construction.

“Overall, I’m excited that Annenberg is embarking on the path they are. Providing their students with these creative tools is phenomenal,” DiStefano said. “It’s very unique, and there are not a lot of universities that are doing this. I think that providing it as a free tool for the students is going to drop down that barrier of access so that anyone who wants to be creative has access to these amazing, professional tools.”

 

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