Let's start with the back-story or history on the Adobe Mercury Playback engine.  Back at IBC in September, the show happened in Amsterdam and while Adobe was there talking about several things including Adobe Story - over at the NVIDIA booth, we were showing a technology preview with quiet undertones.  It didn't have the name Mercury and it wasn't even really the big thing we were showing.  However, John at FXGuide was over there and among several other tidbits, included Adobe in a podcast that he did over at the show. A month crawls along and during that time, the podcast starts to get some mentions in various forums and chatter amongst the creative crowd... People start to get excited about the possibilities and ask questions.  Here's the high bandwidth version for your viewing pleasure.

Let me be clear before I go any further: This is a technology demo only and while Adobe is very excited, it’s not something that is available now in CS4 nor are we commenting about exactly when it will make an appearance.  Now, back to our regularly scheduled exciting blog post...  

Somewhere along the way, amidst the growing awareness at Adobe, we conferred upon how to let our customers know about this exciting technology that we were working on and how to respond to the growing awareness of it.  Simple questions like, 'How do we respond?', 'How much do we tell customers' and several more like it.  Another question was, 'What do we call it?' For, as each person began to play with prototypes of this technology, each was convinced of its incredible potential.  This group included myself and my first casual examination of the Mercury Playback engine convinced me of it's importance - more on that later. read more...