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By Chris Bradshaw, Autodesk Senior Vice President, Media & Entertainment
Today there is no doubt that companies in film, games and television are facing increasing challenges. Margins are razor thin and the complexity of production continues to increase. Clients are demanding more for their money: more CG, more animation, more sophisticated visual effects and of course higher quality. At the same times production is becoming increasingly decentralized and globalized with teams collaborating across time-zones, geographies and even languages.
To tackle these challenges head-on, many leading creative producers have turned to Shotgun Software, whose cloud-based production management platform has become an industry standard. Autodesk announced today that we have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Shotgun, and we’ll be working together to accelerate their vision of a broad and deep production management platform that can help customers solve the gnarly problems of keeping their projects on track, on schedule, and on budget by providing better collaboration and greater transparency on the various production processes and interdependencies.
Once this transaction closes, Don Parker, co-founder and CEO of Shotgun, will be joining the Autodesk Media & Entertainment team to lead the Production Platform group and together we plan to accelerate innovation around the Shotgun platform with a much larger development team. We are really excited about what the extended team will do. The roadmap is ambitious: the Shotgun team has proven its mastery of fast, flexible and collaborative development based on rapid iteration with clients. Their open and collaborative approach is a best practice that Autodesk will continue to support.
One of the great features of the Shotgun platform is that it works well with toolsets from multiple companies including Autodesk, Adobe, Side Effects and The Foundry as well as in-house tools. This open collaboration is core to the Shotgun design and development philosophy and is also something that Autodesk believes is fundamentally important to the future success of the industry. Autodesk has long sponsored initiatives to promote more transparent production processes and facilitate data exchange; from FBX – now a highly popular and effective way for any application to export 3D animation to game engines – to initiatives we invest in supporting such as OpenEXR, Alembic, OpenSubdiv, OpencolorIO or Pixar’s new Universal Scene Descriptor initiative. Autodesk will continue to invest in and expand the ability for our customers to collaborate across a broad set of multi-vendor tools. The production environment is not going to get simpler — it is going to get more complex — and customers will need tools to help manage that complexity. We believe such tools have to be open and vendor agnostic to be effective.
The great Shotgun Street Team will continue to support its customers, so we don’t expect any change to the amazing level of customer service and support that customers have come to depend on from Shotgun. As we significantly increase development resources for Shotgun, we are confident Shotgun customers will see faster development and improvement in the platform. For more information for Shotgun and Autodesk customers, please visit http://www.autodesk.com/shotgun.
Autodesk is thrilled to welcome the Shotgun team, customers and partners to our community and we look forward to working together to develop an open and standardized production processes so that creative companies can focus on what matters the most – the art – and less on the mechanics of getting the data through the pipeline whether its internally or from one company to the next.
