MAX 2005: Tuesday Keynote
The Tuesday keynote started with a humor sketch based on the Flash movie that pushed the Studio 8 launch — the “Make a Match” thing.
Then David Mendells took the stage to talk about how well Flash video is doing. A series of demonstrations showed off some of the new features of Flash 8 video. We also got a sneak peak at Adobe After Effects doing some Flash stuff. Not sure if this is in the product now, since I don’t use After Effects, but we were shown keying video, dropping in a background, animated text and such and you can export it to swf using vectors, or flv.
The founder of BrightCove spoke about that company. They have a service where you can store and serve your video, and perhaps monetize it.
Macromedia announced some changes to Breeze, including “Room Extensions” and “SyncSWF”. The first allows you to add extensions like closed captioning to a breeze meeting. SyncSWF is an API for synchronizing Flash content inside of a breeze meeting.
We also got a little info about the progress in deploying Flash on more mobile platforms. More phones, more applications, but no news on a carrier willing to use Flash in the U.S. They talked about Flash Lite on BREW as well.
So, to sum up, the keynote today was a lot of little demos, but not much real news. No mention of Director.