NVIDIA's Quadro and Tesla GPUs are the driving forces behind Adobe Creative Cloud. Source: NVIDIA.
At the 2014 NAB Show in Vegas earlier this month, Adobe (ADBE +3.54%) showcased some thrilling enhancements to the video apps in its Adobe Creative Cloud solution.
Some of the useful functionality includes new masking and tracking abilities for newsrooms to automatically follow subjects to blur faces and logos, autosave to Creative Cloud for automated backup of projects, and a slick "Master Clip" feature in Premiere Pro and SpeedGrade to enable effects applied to original clips to ripple down through all instances.
But perhaps the most intriguing updates were applied to Adobe Anywhere, which allows users of video solutions like Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Adobe After Effects CC to work together on centralized media through disparate networks.
Translation? If you've got people in disparate locations who all need to work simultaneously on the same massive video files, Adobe Anywhere allows them each do so in real time without conflicts -- just as though the video files were stored locally on their machines. No more slow FTP uploads. No more sacrificing the quality of your video to save time. No more shipping hard drives to remote offices.
The driving force behind Adobe Creative Cloud
If you're wondering exactly how Adobe achieved this monumental feat, look no further than its close collaboration with longtime partner and graphics specialist NVIDIA (NVDA +1.23%). As Steve Parker, NVIDIA's CTO, Pro Visualization and Design, recently elaborated:
NVIDIA and Adobe have a very fluid relationship. It starts at the engineer-to-engineer level, where engineers from NVIDIA and engineers from Adobe are in regular contact. Whether it's regular engineering meetings, or face-to-face discussions, brainstorming sessions -- it's almost like another engineering team within NVIDIA. We collaborate with them that closely.
Sure enough, only a few days after Adobe unveiled its enhancements, NVIDIA announced its GPUs are powering all of the upcoming releases and new GPU-accelerated features of Adobe Creative Cloud. That includes everything from GPU-accelerated ray tracing in After Effects, to the remote streaming capabilities and Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Anywhere and Premiere Pro CC.
The multimillion-dollar question
Of course, this raises the question: Should investors expect this to move NVIDIA's revenue needle going forward?
Probably not. Well, at least not directly over the near term, anyway. What this does provide, however, is yet another piece of validation for NVIDIA's world-class, cloud-based graphics technology. What's more, this also shows just how pervasive NVIDIA continues to become, especially considering we already know NVIDIA -- long thought of as a hard-core gaming specialist -- wants its GPUs to power everything from your smartphone to your camera and your car.
In the end, whether it succeeds on all fronts remains to be seen. But over the long term, these are exactly the kinds of lofty aspirations I love to see as an investor.
