We’re here at the Prism booth with Adobe‘s Jim Guerard, who is an NAB veteran. Here’s his view from the vantage point of Day 1, 2006 about 3 .pm.

Jim Guerard: The show feels really good and alive. As I look around, two things pop to mind. One is on the historical point of view. Twelve years ago, when we talked about professional production, you had to have a $100K computer. And it was a very specialized industry where you had Media Composer artists, Flame artists—and the universe revolved around those people—in many respects, rightly so. The PC was considered a toy by this industry. What we’ve seen with the evolution of hardware technology and the approachability of software is a democratization of content creation. It’s very clear standing here today that what people—many more people—can do with desktop software is incredibly compelling.

From a technology point of view, we’ve matured as an industry to where it’s not about the latest feature and it’s more about the workflow and the productivity of these products together—whether they’re from the same manufacturer or a mix. On a business side, for the first time in a long time, this industry is on the cusp of some great new growth opportunities. After a couple of years of talking about it, with technologies like Flash the ability to build new revenue, distribution, and ad models has finally become a reality.

That ability to take your content—either new or existing content—and bring it to all these methods of distribution, whether it’s the traditional closed systems such as cinema and televison or the newer methods based on DVD and online—or in the future for other devices—I think we’ll see distribution democratized the way that content creation has democratized over the last 10 years.

Who would have envisioned 12 years ago that we would have had something like the Internet to carry rich media and content—and now we’re talking about mobile phones?.

So how do you prepare for all this new opportunity? Well technology will play a role, especially in integrating workflow and ultimately bringing content creation and distribution together. But from creative professional point of view something’s still true that’s always been true: there’s no substitute for classic training in the basics of artistic creativity. As much as manufacturers work to develop tools to automate it, you can’t teach someone creativity.

The thing that really drives this industry is an open-mindededness to embrace new concepts and experiment with those—passionately.