At the other end of the spectrum, the downloading of 3D games to new wireless mobile phones is seen as a developing market. “The capability of cell phones in terms of 3D is comparable to that of the PlayStation 1,” claimed Patel. “Migration to broadband will spur the growth of online games. The gaming audience will grow as younger gamers enter the market and older gamers do not exit as quickly.”

Creation is no longer isolated either. Assets need to be repurposed within the pipeline to suit a variety of delivery outlets from DVD to physical merchandise. “Where a character for the PS3 ported to a PSP might use the same base object it requires a different set of polygons and rendering.”

Besner observed that directors such as Peter Jackson and George Lucas were leaders in “iterative filmmaking”: using digital workflows from storyboard to final output to change, add or reorder sequences right across the timeline.

New Product Roadmap
Where do all of these rapidly changing scenarios leave Autodesk? It wants to offer technology at every point of the pipeline right on through animation, compositing and grading. It doesn’t have all the pieces yet but has amassed sufficient tools to capitalize on future workflows, which, as it predicts, will be data intensive, parallel and collaborative.

It indicated, for example, that it is working on solutions to better manage data complexity and file exchange for remote working and also that it may develop a competing asset management software to Avid’s Alienbrain.

Autodesk is investing in InfiniBand, a high-speed connection technology, which can be bonded for additional bandwidth. Speed increases made possible by InfinBand can be seen above.

Autodesk Color, a color management initiative, is being implemented across its systems range from Toxik to Lustre, Flame and Smoke. This is designed to match color values on any monitor within a facility viewed on Autodesk equipment and to provide confidence that what is being viewed on screen is how it will look when output to print.

Autodesk also made it clear that it has a strong emphasis on integrating 2D and 3D and that this marriage of hitherto separate skills is also impacting on the colorist. Lustre, its color correction platform, is being deployed about 50/50 between traditional colorists used to physically interacting with film negative and telecine hardware and between new artists emerging from a compositing background on Flame or Inferno.

“There’s a new breed approaching grading with a compositing mind frame,” suggested Petit. “They’ve deconstructed the scene in their mind beforehand and deploy 3D shapes and tracking in the colorist suite. The toolsets of compositing and grading are merging.”

The company is investing in InfiniBand, a high-speed connection technology that can be bonded for additional bandwidth. Toxik product manager Chris Vienneau could envision two to three streams of HD being pumped simultaneously around a facility. Autodesk’s Incinerator, an InfiniBand based cluster processing system, has been designed with that in mind, and award-winning Technicolor Montreal colorist Nico Ilies (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) was able to show how background rendering of blurs and secondary color correction on Lustre optimized with Incinerator improves performance.

“If your client wants you to change something on the fly you can do so in 2K realtime, locate clips nonlinearly and work with group shots to quickly apply a look,” Ilies said. “It’s a process familiar to anyone working in Avid edit environment but taken to a new level.”

Added Vienneau; “If you combine finishing with grading, create interactive vfx in an editorial environment and integrate 2D and 3D you get more than the sum of the parts. A lot of our direction is to be able to maintain leadership in this. Video customers using 3D are generally working as part of a pipeline that includes complementary 2D and 3D applications, especially compositing and editing tools. They need to iterate quickly and make changes with minimum disruption. Where clients have their top artists working on, say, Lustre, we want to achieve a halo effect in which the suite is surrounded by more Autodesk applications such as Maya and [collaborative digital compositing software] Toxik.”

Adrian Pennington is a U.K.-based freelance writer and editor of animation magazine Imagine.