EXPLORING HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE TRENDS IN 2024

Addy Ghani, Vice President of Virtual Production, disguise

The hardware and software trends in media and entertainment may surprise us in the next coming years. Going forward, we are seeing evolving trends in areas of decentralization and an ever-increasing reliance on high-speed, low-latency networking infrastructure. One of the areas where we may see a huge uptick is in real-time graphics performance, in near-cloud infrastructure. As more AI SaaS services emerge, the rise of powerful GPUs, and even specialized AI cores, will need to be accessed almost instantaneously – or as close to it as possible.

Jeremy Smith, Chief Technologist, HP Inc.

The amount of data that VFX professionals have to work with these days is staggering. When it comes to looking into the crystal ball, it’s figuring out how artists and studios are going to work with massive volumes of data, the compute power required to process that data, and how all of that data is going to be managed and stored. All of the exciting creative trends in television and film, like virtual production, AI-augmented workflows and the continuous demand for higher-quality content, are all driving this data boom.

So even as computation time and power are shooting up dramatically, the time to create content hasn’t actually changed that much because the quality bar keeps increasing at an almost exponential rate. In order to maximize processing power, we’re seeing developers embrace both the GPU and the CPU in workstations like the HP Z8 Fury, enabling artists to iterate much faster than ever before. We’re also seeing that organizations in VFX continue to operate with teams in a remote environment, leveraging talent pools around the world. All of these forces are driving a massive digital transformation across the industry where studios are looking to technology developers to help devise smarter ways to handle workflow infrastructure, distributed teams, a massive influx of data – and innovative ways to store and manage that data.

Tram Le-Jones, Vice President of Solutions, Backlight

2023 has been a tumultuous year, but there are many reasons to look forward to an exciting and innovation-filled 2024. This year won’t just be about new cutting-edge tools that will redefine what’s possible in VFX; I’m also anticipating a transformation in how we consider the way in which we work.

Realizing a more efficient and interconnected future won’t hinge on a single change. Perhaps the most significant objective the industry can have in 2024 will be fostering more collaboration and bringing people together both in VFX and across the entire production pipeline. Workers want to feel connected in the production process – they want to know what’s happening upstream, how that information translates downstream, and how we keep it all connected so teams are referencing the same information efficiently. As we brace for a deluge of work in 2024, the industry will need to optimize for both efficiency and impact. That will start with taking a hard look at our processes and revisiting workflows, production management and especially asset management. Given the sheer volume of data and media we expect to handle, the demand for intuitive, scalable solutions will skyrocket. I believe this need will catalyze a surge in collaboration across the whole production ecosystem, with more software providers partnering up to provide solutions that address entire workflows. Just as we’ve witnessed with virtual production, I anticipate more departments will want to go from script to screen on one production in a more collaborative, flexible way than ever before.

James Knight, Global Director, Media & Entertainment/ Visual Effects, AMD

Those mocap volumes are not going anywhere – they’re here to stay! Television is really starting to embrace virtual production en masse, and motion capture falls under that. The use of virtual cameras for directors, directors of photography and artists to walk around, lens and film environments as if they were really there; I see that becoming even more ubiquitous than it is. I see more pros in film and TV being more curious and discovering that process. I anticipate more professional discovery and people understanding more about the power of utilizing the volume along with motion capture and virtual production, and what that can do to pipelines that didn’t previously involve VP – streamlining the traditional pillars of post-production, production and pre-production into one iterative process.

Eric Bourque, Vice President of Content Creation, Media &Entertainment, Autodesk

While it’s impossible to predict exactly what’s around the corner, we know that our VFX and animation customers are constantly looking for ways to work more efficiently. This has been a driving force behind so much innovation in media and entertainment at Autodesk, including a push toward cloud-driven production, collaborating cross-industry on open source initiatives and exploring the promise of AI for accelerating artist workflows.

Data interoperability poses massive bottlenecks for VFX studios working with distributed teams around the world, and we are investing in open source efforts to tackle these complex challenges. Most recently we came together with Pixar, Adobe, Apple and NVIDIA in the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD. We are also working with Adobe to help drive a new source shading model with OpenPBR to move toward a reality where files can move seamlessly from one digital content creation system to another.

AI tools in some form or another have played a role in boosting VFX workflows for many years now, and we also see generative AI taking things one step further. For instance, we are integrating AI services developed using NVIDIA Picasso, a foundry for building generative AI models, into Maya, and are also teaming up with Wonder Dynamics to deliver an integration between Maya and Wonder Studio – a tool that harnesses the power of AI for character-driven VFX workflows.