To keep pace with consumer demand, the media and entertainment industry is becoming a more globalized business. Today’s film and television productions involve hundreds – or thousands – of creatives in countries around the world, collaborating to produce compelling, must-see content. However, these complex productions generate petabytes of data, including hundreds of shots, thousands of VFX, and digital assets (with their millions of versions) that must be shared and managed. To keep global teams in sync, studios rely on cloud-based workflows that connect data and processes throughout each production, from on-set to final pixel.
Shifting production to the cloud helps teams maximize efficiency and creativity, while also offering a connected workflow across the production lifecycle. This starts on set - the heart of a production - with camera-to-cloud solutions like Autodesk Moxion. Moxion enables teams to bring digital dailies from a set onto a secure and flexible platform for realtime review from any location. Prior to having tools like Moxion, productions struggled to share data with those not on set, resorting to transporting hard drives to facilities for screening edits and dailies – a potential security risk and waste of resources. Further, combining Moxion with cloud-based production management tools, like Autodesk ShotGrid, allows global studios to expedite workflows and achieve powerful results.
Developing and adopting open standards is another way facilities can operate more nimbly and collaborate more efficiently. Open standards are critical for interoperability and democratizing access to toolsets, allowing globally-dispersed teams to collaborate across facilities and share production data and media without error. Aligning on standards lets teams focus on the creative aspects of production, rather than spending time and resources on troubleshooting pipeline and file conversions.
To advance open standards, Autodesk recently partnered with the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) to announce the open sourcing of RV, the Sci-Tech award-winning media review and playback software currently in ShotGrid. As a member of ASWF, Autodesk is dedicating engineering resources to ASWF-hosted open source projects, including MaterialX, OpenTimelineIO and industry-wide USD efforts.
As the M&E industry continues to face relentless pressure to produce high quality content with tighter budgets, shorter timelines and smaller teams, implementing fully connected, cloud-based workflows based on open standards will be critical to help maximize efficiency and creativity, helping studios better compete.
Diana Colella is the SVP of Media & Entertainment at Autodesk (www.autodesk.com), which is headquartered in San Francisco.