Entertainment studios and gaming companies face relentless pressure to produce compelling content. The goal? More stories and games, faster and with leaner staff. In the streaming era, players and audiences are just a click away from moving to a different app or channel.

To compete in this always-on, always-ready-for-the-next-best-thing environment, you need creativity and efficiency. Working in the cloud helps with both, enabling industry collaboration and better workflows.

At Autodesk, it’s our job to provide the tools that allow our customers to unleash their greatest potential. And at Autodesk University 2022, we’re excited to share how we’re working to make collaboration more seamless, open, and accessible for everyone, everywhere.

Uniting the production pipeline in the cloud

The varied schedules and diverse technology in film, TV, and modern games production make collaboration a challenge. With productions spanning hundreds of people across many locations with thousands of shots, numerous assets, and millions of versions, we’re talking petabytes of data. Our new media and entertainment industry cloud, Autodesk Flow, is being created to bring people and data together across the production pipeline to unify workflows and data.

The idea is to create centralized asset management systems where all project information can live and be shared throughout the project lifecycle for continuity.

We’re also harnessing the cloud to provide connected workflows upstream in production, and Moxion is a great example. Our efforts are driven by genuine needs. Production teams have long struggled with siloed data, manually moving data on and off disconnected systems. At its worst, hard drives were literally trucked around between facilities, and the same shots had to be recreated over and over, draining time and increasing the risk of error.

Moxion, our powerful, cloud-based platform for digital dailies, brings raw footage from the set, into one flexible tool for review by anyone, anywhere, moments after capture. Studios and production managers coupling this with ShotGrid for project management are already seeing powerful results.

Amazon Studios, the production arm of Prime Video, is building a ‘6th generation Studio,’ moving many aspects of production and post to the cloud. Amazon Studios is the home for talent, creating and producing original films and television series for a global audience.

Original series premiere exclusively on Prime Video, which is available in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide. To manage many moving parts, and enable collaboration between teams, Amazon Studios leverages ShotGrid and Moxion to connect its production pipeline in the cloud, where on-set data flows to post-production nearly in real time.

Eric Iverson, director of product strategy at Amazon Studios said, “We see the power of these solutions at work in Prime Video’s epic narratives. Properly maintaining assets of a huge slate is pivotal to bringing new content to life, and in today’s work environment, business as usual isn’t an option.”

Driving the industry forward with open standards

A fluid cloud environment for the production pipeline leads to better collaboration. Open and interoperable data flows through flexible and scalable pipelines with much less friction. That’s why we and other companies in the M&E industry are making significant investments in developing and promoting open standards.

We’re  open sourcing technologies such as RV. RV allows VFX and animation artists and production teams to view high-resolution images and sequences in real time and compare different versions while collaborating on projects. We’re providing our code contributions, alongside other industry collaborators like Sony and DNEG. The Open Review Initiative, a new project within the Academy Software Foundation, will drive a unified, open-source toolset for playback, review, and approval.

We’re also delivering Bifrost for Maya USD integration that allows you to author USD assets using the Bifrost graph. And we are supporting and driving MaterialX, Open Color IO, gITF, Open Timeline IO, and a range of other open standards to help transform the industry from closed and siloed, to open and collaborative.

Bringing the power of Maya to more artists, everywhere

Maya is renowned for its 3D animation and visual effects toolset used by the largest studios around the world. We want to make content creation more accessible by lowering the barrier to entry for artists operating independently and in smaller facilities.

Maya Creative is our new, more affordable version of Maya that allows creatives to tap into the power of Maya via Flex, our pay-as-you-go option for daily product use. You pay for what you use, nothing more. This model allows smaller studios to quickly add artists to their workforce to minimize crunch time.

Whether you’re a freelancer, a small indie studio, or a large production house, we’re here to empower you with the tools and workflows that bring your creativity to life. Learn more about how we’re moving the industry forward at Autodesk University 2022.