April 2015 – The trend from the three big “A” companies at NAB – Autodesk, Adobe, Avid – were all showing collaboration in the cloud as the main theme. While the individual companies also highlighted enhancement to the point tools in the content creation flow, the commonality was that projects are moving away from single location work efforts to multi-site projects. Avid was discussing enhancements to the Avid Everywhere environment, Adobe was showing Adobe Anywhere for Video, and Autodesk discussed their Shotgun acquisition for cloud based production management.
Autodesk recently acquired Shotgun to help manage the multi-site development being done with their tools. The management environment supports data being stored at a location network location or workstation, and the metadata for that data being in the cloud. The system can also manage data that is created in the new Flame 2016 which has an enhanced workflow option for batch and interactive operation, versioning support, proxy support and export that can all be integrated with Shotgun. Similarly, Maya 2016 has improved animation performance due to parallel rigging options, CPU/GPU and large memory support, cloud based rendering in addition to Shotgun integration. The bifrost feature for liquid simulation inside Maya, has been also been enhanced for 2016 to support foam, froth, bubbles, new camera positions.
Along with the Shotgun acquisition, Autodesk brought in RV from Tweak Software. The combined Shotgun & RV teams will work together inside Autodesk to integrate their review collaboration & production management tools further other Autodesk products such as Maya & 3ds Max. The RV player is a front end for almost any project's review process – the product is used not just by creating artists but by directors & production team members to review shots. Together with Shotgun, RV forms the core of an image and scene viewer for VFX, game developers and animation artists. The software is used by major companies such as Blizzard, Disney, ILM, WETA and many others.
Autodesk Momento 3D mapping creation from Real Images
Finally helping to support further realism, the 3ds Max product has been updated with support for render services in the cloud. This allows for cost effective high CPU/GPU count render access on an as needed basis. With the integration with Shotgun, the management of these assets can be centrally managed and incorporated into the single design database for a project. Currently in public Beta in the cloud is a new tool called Momento. The product builds a 3D mesh from captured reality inputs – both photos and scans. The resulting 3D meshes can be cleaned up, fixed, and optimized for the Web, mobile or 3D printing / fabrication. Memento is part of Autodesk’s Reality Computing portfolio and is a companion to its ReCap product.
Adobe Anywhere for video is a collaborative workflow platform that lets teams using Adobe professional video tools—including Adobe Premiere® Pro, Prelude®, and After Effects®—to work as a group with centralized media & assets across any standard network. The platform lets members of a project group collaborate using standard open systems & networks, along with standard workflow processes to log, edit, share, and finalize video productions with a proxy-free workflow.
Adobe Anywhere complements Adobe Creative Cloud™ and supports the enterprise-level production workflows where the Creative Cloud applications are hosted on-premises with other enterprise media storage and asset management infrastructure. Adobe Anywhere software is installed on a cluster of servers at your local facility. The cluster contains two types of nodes: a single Adobe Anywhere Collaboration Hub node on the central server and three or more Adobe Mercury Streaming Engine nodes on the user endpoints or separate servers.
The source media files are located on a storage server connected via a high-bandwidth OS-level file system mount. All project users can upload source files to the storage server. Once the files are on the storage server, they can be used by other editors. The core component managing the platform is the Adobe Collaboration Hub. It contains the database of project management information, metadata, user access, coordinates the nodes of the cluster, and provides an API for integration to other Adobe Anywhere clusters.
Finally, Avid was showing off Avid Everywhere and the Media Central Platform which are the key products for their cloud strategy. Currently today’s media creation workflows involve piecing together a collection of disparate products, services, and tech to create a digital media solution, that range from media creation products, through management tools all the way to monetization solutions. The Avid MediaCentral Platform is an open, extensible, and customizable foundation that simplifies workflows by integrating products and services into a single platform thus bringing a realization to the Avid Everywhere vision. MediaCentral doesn’t require any additional software purchase or installation as it is integrated into the framework of many existing Avid products. There are additional components in the platform that allow for extensibility to non-Avid products in the workflow including transport and security partners.
From a distributed and Cloud workflow for a content creation engine there is Media Composer Cloud. It enables any Media Composer editing station with Internet access to connect to an Interplay Production Workgroup and get access to the remote material. As a difference from the Adobe VPN centric solution, for quick access the designers can have proxies of finished edits before the full resolution media uploads are complete. The new versions of Media Composer & ProTools for both on premise and cloud licenses share a common media engine and share some commonality in internal commands and tools. In order to move to this common engine, the ProTools product received multiple significant improved on the access to network shared storage from the prior default of DAS.