NAB; Hits and misses

While I wasn't at NAB, in fact last time I was at trade show was Siggraph 2006, I did hear a few interesting things.

A seemingly big hit in my mind was Foundrys purchase of Modo.  This is indeed fantastic as Foundry is such a solid software company and they truly understand our workflow, mentality and needs.

Imagine, Modos smooth integration with Nuke, enhanced to run faster and being the mo-graphers tool of choice.

Then there is further detailing what benefits Hiero brings to our pipeline.

All these tools have a huge impact on infrastructure as they are really all parts of one large seemingly living organism.

The implications are exciting.

Then there was Autodesk, well.... umm.... not so much.  Anyways...

A brief analogy of my point.

Back in 05' ish Clark Foam closed shop in rather Draconian fashion.  At that time, ~95% of all foam blanks world wide used as the core of surf boards were made by Clark Foam.

While speculation was high as to this seemingly ruthless act, the 2 main rumors were;

1) He lost his mind.

2) He wanted to force a paradigm shift in the surf industry.

Since then, a rich field of materials has emerged to replace the traditional foam blank.  As a result, newer more radical designs/shapes/wights are now being seen that up the fun factor for surfers.

Is it time for this to happen in the field of animation apps?

I will say one thing for paradigm shifts, they force you to rethink the status quo.

A personal example relating to our industry was BlueArcs demise.  Prior to that, i was happy to have one for the rest of my profession.  Just keep upgrading BlueArc to BlueArc etc...

But I was forced to look at options and realized how truly important it is to deconstruct your views and ideologies on a regular basis, keeps you fresh and relevant.

 

- Brian