|
Autodesk’s Television
Industry Manager Bruno Sargeant was in
Mumbai recently for Autodesk’s Film Visual Effects Super User
Tour. In an exclusive conversation with AnimationXpress.com’s
Money Sharma and Mrigank Dhaniwala, Sargeant
discussed the acquisition of Softimage and Autodesk’s market
strategies.
When not globe-trotting,
Sargeant works out of his Los Angeles office developing Autodesk’s
business strategy in the television industry and liaising
with product managers to help them build the right products.
Excerpts from the interview…
Autodesk has an extensive
portfolio of products…
We have so many products now, so the goal is to really focus
on where the business is going in each market segment and
build cross-product strategies. For eg, the strategy to build
integration between Maya and Flame. Besides, we have built
a compatible workflow between Smoke and Flame, where you can
move projects backward and forward between the two systems.
How will your product portfolio
be enhanced with acquisition of Softimage underway?
We will close the acquisition process around the end of November.
I think, we learnt a lot from the lessons with Alias. There
were a lot of questions about what the future was for Maya.
We decided to keep both Maya and 3dsMax alive and now, both
have very healthy businesses. We moved forward by basically
maintaining the product lines and maintaining those businesses.
And it worked.
The same philosophy will be
applied to XSI. We’re building a set of 3D asset creation
tools, namely, XSI, 3dsMax and Maya.
Did Face Robot help the
decision?
We don’t have a product like Face Robot, which is why
it fits well in the production family. It focuses on a niche
market which we don’t currently address and helps build our
portfolio. It’s a great new addition.
What are your global business
strategies?
We look at the business opportunities in the entertainment
industry and assess what we are good at. A piece of software
isn’t creative, it’s the person that uses it. You have to
provide them with an environment that doesn’t hinder how they
work. For eg, improved workflows, where one doesn’t have to
go through many steps before one can actually start the task
of being creative.
With .fpx, you can share more
complete data sets between applications, so you do not have
to recreate all the time. In the TV commercials market, we
are using assets from automobile manufacturers, bringing them
into the TV commercial space, taking it to the next step by
building commercials around the borrowed assets.
Thereby, you don’t have to
rebuild all those processes which someone has already done.
You just build on existing data sets and accumulate data sets
so that you can focus on what you have to do in a particular
place in the pipeline.
| |
There’s a lot of competition in
the 3D space: Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Adobe
 |
Television in India doesn’t
use high-end editing tools. Where does this figure in Autodesk’s
plans?
We are not an offline company, but we share workflows
with Final Cut Pro and Avid, so if you want to bring a project
which started in Final Cut Pro or Avid, into your Smoke system,
it comes across more completely. You don’t have to rebuild
steps, you just carry the data across.
There is a portion of the market
where the content being created is high value, where it makes
sense to finish in a high-end finishing system like Smoke
and Lustre. With long form, episodic, prime-time shows it
makes sense for studios to finish in high-end system.
More CG is finding its way
into mainstream TV shows. The budget of these shows is not
very high but we have solution that can create visualization
content. There are plenty of vendors out there that service
the mass market, first cut editing business. What we do is
take the content to the next step.
What is your strategy behind
the acquisition of Softimage?
There’s a lot of competition in the 3D space: Google, Microsoft,
NVIDIA. There are a lot of people intensely interested in
3D, Adobe is developing more 3D in its products.
We have a strong 3D core engineering
base in Montreal and we needed more engineers to expand. Besides,
Avid was divesting in Softimage and, in more ways than one,
the acquisition made perfect sense.
You watch more TV, play
more games and go to movies ‘cause its cheaper
|
|
What impact will the current
global economic recession have on entertainment in general?
The recession is going to affect every business. The key is
to make sure that you have diversity in your market and your
product portfolios, which is what we do. There’s a twist to
this because during recession people watch more entertainment.
The entertainment business does not always follow the economy.
You watch more TV, play more games and go to movies ‘cause
its cheaper.
We changed our business model
and embarked on a new strategy in 2006 and are delivering
on it. Part of it is making sure that we continually and consistently
deliver value in our releases. So Flame, Smoke and Inferno
will all have very strong extension releases. We actually
have more in this extension, which is supposed to be just
a feature pack.
money.sharma@animationxpress.com
mrigank.dhaniwala@animationxpress.com
|
