Dear Adobers
I‘ve given presentations at Adobe Video World several times over the last few years, the first being way back in 2014 when it was still called ‘After Effects World Conference’. Here are my personal thoughts and impressions on Adobe Video World 2020, which ran from 12th – 17th September 2020.
Networking
Due to Covid-19, this year’s AVW was a digital event. This was quite a challenge, especially for an event that‘s not only about learning, but also networking. You can learn a ton about After Effects and Premiere Pro at AVW, but as with many events, the connections you make in between the sessions, during coffee breaks or parties, can sometimes be even more valuable.
If your focus is on After Effects and Premiere Pro, there’s simply no other event in the world where you’ll find so many like-minded people to geek out with about all the technical details of your favorite software, or discuss the latest trends in motion design.
Of course it’s much harder to network in an online event, but the AVW team did a lot to encourage small talk in between sessions. There were ‘coffee breaks’, ‘Birds of a feather’ sessions and ‘After hours parties’, all essentially different forms of video chats where you could join and meet other attendees. From a technical perspective, these Zoom calls worked pretty well – you could easily see and talk to 10 people or more, and the experience was really flawless. Due to the time zone differences, the early coffee breaks were mostly filled with Europeans like myself, whereas the ‘Birds of a Feather’ and ‘Party’ sessions were generally more crowded.
In addition to those unmoderated networking sessions, there were also highly interactive sessions like the AVW special episode of the “Motion Design Hotline”. Here, Kyle Hamrick and Evan Abrahams did a great job of answering your questions, as well as entertaining.
Another of these interactive session was ‘Being Your Own Client’, where Orrin Zucker (one of the two brains behind Monkey Tools) and Eran Stern talked about developing After Effects extensions to generate some passive income. Since this business model has been my full time job with mamoworld for a number of years, Eran also spontaneously invited me to share my experience during the session. This level of interactivity – the possibility of reacting directly with the audience – really surprised me. It also ensured the event was truly an event, rather than just people watching live-streamed tutorials.
Sessions
Networking is one thing, but learning is another. In this respect, I felt the online nature of the event made it even more effective than a non-digital event. All the sessions were recorded, and attendees can watch them for up to 90 days after the event. Whereas in past AVW’s you always had to decide which of the many sessions you wanted to watch at that moment (AVW had up to 5 tracks running in parallel), this year you could attend one session live and still watch the recording of parallel sessions later on.
One of the highlights for me was the keynote from Kurzgesagt, where they gave some really interesting insights into the workflow they use to create their unique animations.
I also loved the sessions by Sander van Dijk, which had highly practical tips on creating unique animations while also staying flexible and within your budget.
I myself gave sessions on
- Getting started with Scripting in Ae
- Rotoscoping workflows
- Keyframes and
- Animation & Music.
The keyframes session covered a lot of the nerdy details of keyframes that I also describe in the chapter Keyframing in After Effects of my free motion graphics eBook.
In the Animation & Music session I enjoyed playing with BeatEdit for After Effects to animate this drummer.
BeatEdit for Ae is still relatively new – many people don’t yet know about it – so it was great to see how eye-opening the session was for them.
Bottom Line
An online event can never fully replace a live one where you get to meet and interact with people in person. But I was pleasantly surprised at how well the organizers implemented their ideas to support networking and interaction. AVW was a great event, and I can’t wait to see you again next year!
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