NEW YORK—Fubo has announced that it will launch the Maximum Effort Channel on June 20 and that the channel’s first original program will be Bedtime Stories with Ryan.

The linear channel is part of a multi-year partnership with Fubo and Maximum Effort that includes an exclusive first-look for unscripted TV series as well as a blind scripted deal. Maximum Effort, a production company co-founded by Ryan Reynolds and George Dewey in 2018, has creative control over the channel's content. Since launching, Reynolds’ banner produced such content as the Deadpool movies, “Free Guy”, “The Adam Project” and the unscripted show “Welcome to Wrexham”.

“We’re so happy to create a program with the express goal of putting people to sleep. This show has actually been a dream of mine for a while,” said Maximum Effort co-founder Ryan Reynolds. “Story time is a nighttime staple in our home and is a daily reminder of the power of storytelling. We’re extremely grateful to our always amazing partners at Autodesk for helping bring this show to life with their design and make platform.”

Autodesk, a leader in design and make software, has signed on as the show’s official Imagination Sponsor. Bedtime Stories with Ryan will be designed and made using Autodesk’s platform, which helps creatives, moviemakers, architects, engineers, students and others make and design things. 

“Autodesk software, used by moviemakers, engineers, and architects to design and make the world around us, also helps the next generation bring their powerful imaginations to life. That’s why we’re thrilled to be the official sponsor of Bedtime Stories with Ryan – a series which inspires these same imaginations,” said Dara Treseder, chief marketing officer at Autodesk. “As part of this work, we are proud to offer students and educators free educational access to our software, helping bright young minds transform their most creative dreams into reality, and one day, literally build a better world.”

More information is available on Autodesk here. 

SAN FRANCISCO—Autodesk has introduced Moxion Rooms, a forensically secure review solution enabling creative teams in production and post-production to share live streams and review uploaded assets in a single cloud-based environment. 

The solution was developed for the specifications and production needs of remote teams working on the Amazon Originals series “The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power,” and is now being released commercially to boost collaboration and productivity for all studios, the company said.  

“Moxion Rooms accommodates collaborative review in a secure environment with video and voice chat, and elegantly hosts and stores everything anyone working on a production needs to access, from budgets to scripts and schedules,” said Ron Ames, producer/founder, The Modern Film Consortium. “This was essential for a project like ‘The Rings of Power’ with so many moving parts. Moxion Rooms quickly replaced what was taking us a combination of four different review solutions, and reliance on OBS, which is not ideal on a high stakes production.” 

“We acquired Moxion to accelerate our move to production in the cloud, and we’re excited to introduce Moxion Rooms to support next-generation creative needs,” said Diana Colella, senior vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “Teams can now collaborate on footage and assets virtually as it is captured, and facilitate fully synced live review sessions via a browser. This ultimately enables faster content delivery and helps keep up with industry demand.”    

The cloud-based Moxion platform supports secure digital dailies and camera to cloud (Immediates) workflows. With Moxion Rooms people can collaborate and review camera footage on set and remotely with the efficiency and immediacy required to make creative decisions during principal photography in 4K high dynamic range (HDR) quality, with studio-grade security. Moxion Rooms includes powerful review tools, video and voice chat, and industry-standard support for Dolby Vision, HDR10 and SDR.

Autodesk Moxion has already earned an Engineering Excellence Award from the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA), a Workflow Systems Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and a Lumiere Award from the Advanced Imaging Society. Moxion supports complex and challenging productions, including “The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power,” "The Midnight Sky," "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," and "The Matrix Resurrections."

For more information, visit https://area.autodesk.com/inspire/articles/ZprTmtx3s

San Francisco, CA (December 10, 2019) – Autodesk today announced the release of Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU. From look development to final frame rendering, Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU simplifies how artists and studios create and iterate content, giving them the speed and flexibility to adapt to a fast-paced working environment and scale rendering capacity to accommodate the ebbs and flows of production. Arnold’s intuitive interface makes it easy to toggle between CPU and GPU rendering, maintaining the same settings with a single click. Arnold GPU is based on NVIDIA’s OptiX framework and optimized to take advantage of NVIDIA RTX technology.

“Rendering workloads continue to grow as content providers strive to meet rising audience expectations for content quality. Speed and interactivity have become more crucial than ever to the creative process. Arnold 6 delivers performance gains that will help lighten the load with the same high-quality render results that the CPU renderer is known for,” said Chris Vienneau, senior director, Media & Entertainment Products, Autodesk. “We’ve worked closely with NVIDIA to optimize Arnold GPU to run on the latest RTX GPUs and RTX Server, and we’re excited to get this latest update into the hands of new and existing Arnold customers.”

“Arnold GPU powered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs will help graphics professionals work faster, meet tight deadlines, and explore new ideas during the creative process,” said Richard Kerris, Industry General Manager for Media & Entertainment, NVIDIA, “Autodesk was the first company to commit to RTX for their Arnold renderer, and we think artists are going to be blown away by the new interactivity, flexibility, and unmatched speed of final rendering using GPUs in Arnold 6.”

First unveiled as a beta release in March, Arnold 6 completes the Arnold GPU toolset with improvements across lights, shaders, and cameras, as well as on-demand texture loading and support for Open Shading Language (OSL) and OpenVDB volumes. Additionally, as part of Autodesk’s continued efforts to accelerate the adoption of open standards, a collection of components for Arnold in the USD ecosystem is now available online.

Arnold 6 highlights include:

--Unified Renderer— Switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering.

--Lights, Cameras and More— Arnold GPU now supports OSL, OpenVDB volumes, on-demand texture loading, most LPEs, lights, shaders, and all cameras. GPU noise is now also on par with CPU noise when using adaptive sampling, which has been improved to yield even faster, more predictable results regardless of the renderer used.

--Optimized for NVIDIA RTX hardware— Take advantage of the latest technology to scale up rendering power when production demands it.

--New USD Components— Hydra render delegate, Arnold USD procedural, and USD schemas for Arnold nodes and properties are now available on GitHub

-- Performance Improvements— Several improvements help maximize efficiency and performance, including faster creased subdivisons, an improved Physical Sky shader, and dielectric microfacet multiple scattering.

Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU is available as a standalone subscription or with a collection of end-to-end creative tools within the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection. For the first time, monthly, annual, and 3-year single-user subscriptions of Arnold are available on the Autodesk e-store. Arnold GPU is also available to try with a free 30-day trial of Arnold 6. Arnold GPU is available in all supported plug-ins for Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana. For more information, visit: https://www.autodesk.com/arnold

San Rafael, CA (April 4, 2019) – Today Autodesk announced Flame 2020, the latest release of the Flame Family of integrated visual effects (VFX), color grading, look development and finishing system for artists. A new machine learning-powered feature set along with a host of new capabilities bring Flame artists significant creative flexibility and performance boosts. This latest update will be showcased at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 8-11 between 9:00am-5:00pm in a demo suite at the Renaissance Hotel.

Advancements in computer vision, photogrammetry and machine learning have made it possible to extract motion vectors, Z depth and 3D normals based on software analysis of digital stills or image sequences. The Flame 2020 release adds built-in machine learning analysis algorithms to isolate and modify common objects in moving footage, dramatically accelerating VFX and compositing workflows.

“Machine learning has enormous potential for content creators, particularly in the areas of compositing and image manipulation where AI can be used to track and isolate objects in a scene to pull rough mattes quickly,” said Steve McNeill, Director Flame Family Products, Autodesk, Media and Entertainment. “Flame has a reputation as the de facto finishing system of choice in the deadline driven world of professional production, and this latest 2020 release significantly extends creative flexibility and performance for our artists.”

Flame Family 2020 highlights include:

· Z Depth Map Generator— Enables Z depth map extraction analysis using machine learning for live action scene depth reclamation. This allows artists doing color grading or look development to quickly analyze a shot and apply effects accurately based on distance from camera.

· Human face Normal Map Generator— Since all human faces have common recognizable features (relative distance between eyes, nose, location of mouth,) machine learning algorithms can be trained to find these patterns. This tool can be used to simplify accurate color adjustment, relighting and digital cosmetic/beauty retouching.

· Refraction— With this feature, a 3D object can now refract, distorting background objects based on its surface material characteristics. To achieve convincing transparency through glass, ice, windshields and more, the index of refraction can be set to an accurate approximation of real-world material light refraction.

· Automatic Background Reactor— Immediately after modifying a shot, this mode is triggered, sending jobs to process. Accelerated, automated background rendering allows Flame artists to keep projects moving using GPU and system capacity to its fullest. This feature is available on Linux only, and can function on a single GPU.

· Simpler UX in Core Areas— A new expanded full width UX layout for MasterGrade, Image surface, and several Map User interfaces, are now available, allowing for easier discoverability and accessibility to key tools.

· ‘Manager’ for Action, Image, Gmask—A simplified list schematic view, Manager makes it easier to add, organize and adjust video layers and objects in the 3D environment.

· Open FX Support—Flame, Flare and Flame Assist version 2020 now includes comprehensive support for industry standard Open FX creative plugins as Batch/BFX nodes or on the Flame timeline.

· Cryptomatte Support—Available in Flame and Flare, support for the Cryptomatte open source advanced rendering technique offers a new way to pack alpha channels for every object in a 3D rendered scene.

· Single user license offering—Linux customers can now opt for monthly, yearly and three-year single user licensing options. Customers with an existing Mac-only single user license can transfer their license to run Flame on Linux.

Flame, Flare™, Flame Assist and Lustre 2020 will be available on April 16, 2019 at no additional cost to customers with a current Flame Family 2019 subscription. For details and pricing, visit the Autodesk website. Early Flame 2020 adopters on beta have responded with enthusiasm to the latest updates:

“I’m super excited about the new machine learning tools in Flame. Machine learning can be used to automate a lot of processes, letting artists focus on more creative tasks. Z Depth Map Generator is a great tool for making depth-of-field adjustments but it’s also a really useful tool for speeding up selective color correction and beauty clean up too.”

Bryan Bayley, Flame Artist, Treehouse Edit

"Arthur C. Clarke once said 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. The machine learning technology inside of Flame is truly magic. I recently worked on a virtual set comp where they forgot to add depth-of-field on the backgrounds. It took me two hours per shot to roto and add motion blur; I ran the same shots through the Z Depth Map Generator and got results in two seconds. Wow!”

Craig Russo, VFX Supervisor, cr2creative

“Loads of people have talked about machine learning for compositing work, but nobody has delivered anything in an actual product. This is really impressively fast compared to the object labelling/mask approach to getting rough mattes quickly.”

Lewis Saunders, freelance Flame Artist, London

LAS VEGAS—“It’s been a really great year for Flame,” Colin Cupp, industry marketing, film & TV at Autodesk, told the assembled crowd during the company’s Sunday night press conference at Joe’s Seafood in Caesars Palace. “We’ve had a lot of subscription growth, opened up the platform and even lowered the price.”

Colin Cupp, Industry Marketing, Film & TV, Autodesk

Cupp discussed Autodesk Flame Family 2018 update 1 for VFX, which includes new action and batch paint improvements such as 16-bit floating point depth support, scene detect and conform enhancements.

There are also enhancements to character creation tools in Autodesk Maya 2017 update 3, among them interactive grooming with XGen, an all-new UV workflow and updates to the motion graphics toolset, including a live link with Adobe After Effects.

Arnold 5.0 delivers significant updates including better sampling, new standard surface and volume shaders, Open Shading Language support, light path expressions, refactored shading API and a VR camera.

Shotgun updates accelerate multi-region performance and make media uploads and downloads faster, regardless of location.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2018 offers Arnold 5.0 rendering via a new MAXtoA 1.0 plugin, customizable workspaces, smart asset creation tools, Bézier motion path animation and a cloud-based large model viewer (LMV) that integrates with Autodesk Forge.

Copyright NAB 2017 

SAN FRANCISCO—Users can now subscribe to Autodesk Flame software in monthly, quarterly or yearly plans, the company announced on Wednesday. Autodesk also announced that Flame will be available as a software only product; customers can also choose their own qualified Linux hardware; and support of the Flame on OS X, as well as Flame Family 2016 Extension 2, are planned to be released later in November.

Flame 2016 timeline workflow

The new subscription plans for Flame and Autodesk Lustre are available at a monthly fee of $750/month, $2,000/quarter, and $6,000/year. Autodesk plans to continue to sell perpetual licenses for the Flame Family. The new Flare and Flame Assist subscription plans start at $400/month, $1,050/quarter, and $3,200/year.

As a result of Flame being sold as a software only product and customers having the ability to use their own Linux hardware Autodesk plans to discontinue sales of the Flame as a turnkey system starting early 2016. In addition, users do not have to own a Flame to purchase the Flare or Flame Assist systems.

Additionally, Autodesk is eyeing Nov. 24 for the release of the Flame Family 2016 Extension 2 and the ability to support Flame on OS X. The new Flame Family extension brings new format support and performance gains in color grading workflows, including GPU acceleration on the Lustre Reactor and support for the full DNxHR media family.

Autodesk’s new subscription plans are available now, as is the ability to purchase Flare and Flame assist.