Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513434
20 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 3 OUTLOOK The Future of Creative Workflows is Connected BY DIANA COLELLA AUTODESK: EXECUTIVE VP FOR M&E L ooking at your Netix home screen or the "What's Showing" list for a local theater, it's readily apparent that the visual bar for lms, episodic series, and video games continues to rise, alongside consumer appetite for amazing new content. As a result, productions have rapidly scaled in size and complexity, intro- ducing collaboration challenges and massive amounts of data to wrangle. A typical project oen involves thousands of artists from multiple vendors working on hundreds of visual eects shots, CG assets, and scenes. With the continued evolution of remote production, more of these artists are working on visuals from dierent locales, using their respective studios' preferred toolsets and data storage. What does this lead to? More fragmentation and less creativity. However, more open ways of working are emerging, along with new opportunities for innovation. Technologies connecting every aspect of production are helping to unify people, data, and workows. At Autodesk, we're working to enable innovation, starting with cre- ating a more connected, creative, and resilient future with Autodesk Flow. It's our new industry cloud for media & entertainment (M&E) that puts data, not les, at the center of collaboration to acceler- ate the development of connected workows. We want to ensure productions can capture, re-use, and track data eciently, with Flow acting as the single source of truth for all assets, versions, and feed- back across a production. The goal is for individual artists, entire de- partments, and studios to be able to work on tasks simultaneously, rather than waiting for one group to wrap before another can begin. Open standards are integral to the foundation of Flow, which will be an open ecosystem. Content creation tools, like Maya, and third-party solutions, such as SideFX, Avid, and Foundry, will be able to plug into Flow and move data easily across applications. The aim is to make everything from storyboards to concept art to shot meta- data captured on set accessible in everyday tools to increase pro- ductivity and avoid wasting time chasing down les. While open standards are making this new future possible, so are rapid advancements in articial intelligence. Leveraging data in a connected environment better prepares the industry to use AI responsibly to enhance automation and productivity. Generative scheduling is one area where AI can help automate processes, re- ducing the time it takes to update a schedule when changes are in- evitably made on a production. What used to take hours, can now be done in minutes. With the ability to predict, plan, and right-size resources using AI capabilities on Flow, it becomes easier to accom- modate last-minute changes and understand how any adjustments will impact the production schedule and budget, and ultimately, a studio's business. It's clear that connecting data, workows, teams, and studios across the production pipeline is key to a brighter M&E future. Streamlining collaboration is a major step forward in easing some of the pressure felt today so that artists can focus on what matters: their art. We're excited for the next phase of innovation and look forward to working with the industry to eect meaningful change in 2024 and beyond.