First announced at last year’s NAB, cloud-based production service Adobe Anywhere is scheduled to launch in May and will be on display at next week’s NAB (booth SL3910) in Las Vegas. The toolset enables collaboration for creative professionals using Adobe Premiere, After Effects and logging tool Prelude. It uses Adobe’s Mercury streaming engine, a server that streams relevant video frames and scales quality based on available bandwidth.

“It effectively gives the same experience to an editor whether they are working in a suite with local storage or on a MacBook Air streaming images over a local area network, according to Niels Stevens, Adobe’s video business development manager,” writes Adrian Pennington for The Hollywood Reporter.

“It will allow a post facility of the future to be virtual,” said Stevens. “That is, they can use talent physically located all over the world provided they can connect to the server.”

“With Adobe Anywhere, editors, visual effects artists, and other video professionals can use local or remote networks to simultaneously access, stream, and work with remotely stored media,” explains Adobe. “No need for heavy file transfers, duplicate media, or proxy files.” (The site includes an interesting 3-minute video highlighting Adobe Anywhere’s capabilities.)

The first version will be made available to broadcasters and postproduction houses with private cloud networks. Pricing has yet to be announced.

“Rival Avid launched its cloud platform Sphere last September, building on its shared storage system ISIS, asset management platform Interplay with Media Composer as the front end,” reports Pennington.

Stevens notes that Adobe Anywhere is different than Sphere since it enables proxy-free working. “All other [competitors] work with low resolution proxies which mean users could be stuck not knowing whether an image is out of sync or in-focus,” he said.

“At NAB, Adobe also plans to introduce upgrades to Premiere Pro, including improved color grading with its Lumetri Deep Color Engine; and a new version of After Effects, which is now integrated with Maxon Cinema4D for the creation of 3D graphics,” notes Pennington.