[HN Gopher] So Long Autodesk Shotgun
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So Long Autodesk Shotgun
Author : aprdm
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-06-20 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thejackjam.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thejackjam.medium.com)
| poisonborz wrote:
| There were bits and pieces of familiar experience there that
| anyone working long time on a consumer software product had, but
| honestly I find it hard to sympathize with this sort of "I wish
| them well, but all goes down now that I left" articles -
| especially naming and framing the company, product, people
| (indirectly in this case). There are hundreds of nuanced reasons
| why decisions were made like this within a huge company like
| Autodesk, things the author does not know about, and we as
| readers even less. There are very, very few straight up success
| stories in this industry, all achievements are "successful
| failures", processes where individual members see things fall
| apart or not improving compared to a personally important point
| in time from their PoV - and for themselves, this is the truth,
| even if the product/company - an abstract thing, for them -
| achieves a form of success.
| Animats wrote:
| The article doesn't mention what the product is _for_. Even the
| sales page for it is rather vague. It 's some kind of project
| management for visual projects. But how much of the job does it
| do? Does it do revision control and asset management, like git or
| Alienbrain? If not, it has to connect to some system that does,
| so it can find whatever someone wants to preview.
|
| A product of this type is that it has to interface to a lot of
| stuff and present some kind of unified interface. That's hard.
| aprdm wrote:
| I think a reason it doesn't as well is because the majority of
| the industry already uses it. Therefore as he says there isn't
| too many opportunities for growth, it's a small industry vfx
| all things considered.
| cjenken wrote:
| I contract a lot of work to build manage and build tools that
| directly integrate into Shotgun/ShotGrid. At it's most basic,
| Shotgun/ShotGrid is just a really nice front end to a database
| that has collections of schemas that align with the task
| workflows at studios that produce content for TV series, movies
| and video games.
|
| Asset management is not as built in but there is some
| infrastructure there that can be leveraged.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Is that the division of Autodesk that was behind the ruthless
| ceiling tile attack on Ton Roosendaal?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
| draw_down wrote:
| Every time you see the trope about a startup inside a big
| company: run.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Big companies don't look at startups as healthy seedlings to
| nurture to maturity, they see them as nitrogen-fixing cover
| crops to plow into depleted fields.
| sonofhans wrote:
| That is brilliant, and extendable. Plowing in some random
| nitrogen-fixer allows them to keep all their industrial
| machinery in place, and make no fundamental changes.
| Switching to learning how to grow seedlings is an entirely
| different frame of mind. One is generative and nurturing,
| where each seedling has potential to be something big and
| important, and thus matters; the other is extractive and
| exploitative, where the seedlings are just biomass for the
| machine.
|
| Really lovely metaphor.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > The high-end visual effects industry that we dominated is
| notoriously slow to adapt to change, and operates for the most
| part on razor-thin margins. There were billions flowing into film
| and episodic production every year, but there wasn't (and likely
| still isn't) an obvious opportunity to further monetise our
| existing customers.
|
| The visual effects industry operates fundamentally on not paying
| people. It is symptomatic of Hollywood broadly. It is absurd that
| the savings of 60 and 70 year olds are, via the children in the
| industry they support, subsidizing Disney.
| dagmx wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand why you say it's about not paying
| people? VFX jobs are usually reasonably well paying and usually
| with good overtime rules.
| bsenftner wrote:
| The visual effects industry is structured around a bidding
| process that cements VFX studio compensation before film
| production has begun. However, film is a collaborative medium
| with financial and production risks with decisions often
| pushed to a later date "to be solved in post". That post
| production VFX stage has grown in size, grown in the types of
| production solutions provided, all without additions or
| modifications of compensation. They simple get to keep the
| ongoing contract, regardless if doing so bankrupts the VFX
| studio. Which it often does. The production digital artists
| receive their contractual compensation, they get to keep
| their jobs, but the production becomes 14 hour days, 6.5 days
| a week for 6 to 9 months. Meanwhile, this is taking place on
| all 6-12 productions flowing though the VFX studio at the
| same time. At some unknown time, the bank and investors
| simple say "no more" and the studio implodes. This is the
| concrete reality of the VFX industry. This is how people do
| not get paid.
| dagmx wrote:
| That seems like a huge jump from the "VFX industry being
| based on not paying people"
|
| Yes, there are some bad business practices that lead to
| companies going out of business. There are lots of
| successful VFX studios too though. That's true of any
| business.
|
| I'm unsure how this means that VFX in specific is based
| around not paying people.
| HillRat wrote:
| If I have the market power through mono- or oligopsony to
| force my vendors to sign fixed-price contracts for
| variable-scope work, I guarantee you they aren't getting
| paid for a lot of that scope, whether that comes out of
| their bottom line or their employees' lives. Hypothetical
| me is going to improve my own bottom line by pushing
| scope ("just fix it in post!") to the part of the budget
| that's contractually-guaranteed to stay fixed.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There are tons of VFX houses that have been the receipent
| or the giver of Trump-esque renegotiations. At the
| beginning, everyone agrees to terms. At the end,
| something somewhere happens which means no more money (if
| the money actually existed to begin with), and people get
| screwed. Most VFX houses I've been in/around have paid on
| hourly rates, so the artists get paid. If the producer
| bringing the work to the VFX reneges, then the VFX house
| eats it (or sues, or something). However, if your a
| contract artist and did the work expecting to be paid at
| end of project, you tend to be left hold the bag since
| the VFX studio didn't get paid then the contractors don't
| get paid.
| dagmx wrote:
| So in the last decade, how many VFX studios have gone
| under leaving people holding the unpaid bag? It's been a
| long time since DD 2.0 and R&H.
|
| I'd hardly take the edge case of the industry (not
| exclusive to VFX) and say that it's representative of the
| norm.
| bsenftner wrote:
| > There are lots of successful VFX studios
|
| For relatively short time periods. Only Weta and ILM are
| able to get equity in their projects, and that is largely
| due to their owners being the filmmakers themselves. In
| the end, it is a work for hire industry, with no equity
| participation, yet carrying significant risk that tends
| to sooner or later blow up at least once, taking the
| entire studio with it.
| dagmx wrote:
| That's a completely different goal post now though from
| saying the industry is based on not paying people. The
| majority of film roles, even outside of VFX, has no
| equity. Equity is the exception not the norm.
|
| Other VFX studios like Imageworks have been doing pretty
| well without equity.
|
| I don't believe Weta or ILM get any equity in their
| projects though. At least, the majority of their projects
| are work for hire.
|
| Either way, this is a another jump from the initial
| statement that the VFX industry is based on not paying
| people.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > The high-end visual effects industry that we dominated is
| notoriously slow to adapt to change
|
| this is patently false. They were the first to jump onboard the
| GPU rendering bandwagon, and have been pushing cuda since it was
| first usable (there is of course a debate about how usable it
| is..)
|
| The issue with shotgun is that its really fucking powerful, but
| also hilariously configurable. Shotgun is there to track each
| shot as it goes through every stage of production. Think of it as
| jira, but far more integrated. Before shotgun was a thing(and
| f-track) people used access, or filemaker. or worse Excel.
|
| > and operates for the most part on razor-thin margins. There
| were billions flowing into film and episodic production every
| year, but there wasn't (and likely still isn't) an obvious
| opportunity to further monetise our existing customers.
|
| This is true. Unless something makes a significant impact, its
| out the door. Shotgun is/was expensive per seat, but allows you
| to cut down loads on time management. You need less production
| staff to run a lighting/animation/comping department. However
| thats a fine line. A production assistant is PS25-35k, but per
| seat licenses of some software is PS1-5k.
|
| Shotgun when it first came out was a massive behemoth. at
| Framestore it was running on the biggest machine we had (from
| memory it was a quad opteron with 64gigs of ram[might have been
| less]) It was ruby on rails, slow unreliable and generally a
| pain, BUT, it totally sped up production for desperaux.
| wdfx wrote:
| A lot of this sounds very familiar. I was working on the in-house
| tools doing the same thing for a very big VFX house from
| 2012-2018. Early on in that job, we only really had one pair of
| tools for production management - one for the project planning (a
| big Gantt chart) and the other for timesheeting. There was
| nothing really in place for the artists to use to know what was
| going on and as such their willingness to enter timesheets was
| pretty low. In order to drive awareness, reduce work for
| coordinators and generally try to help everyone, I was made lead
| to bootstrap a new app in 2014 called... ShotGrid. It did help to
| a degree, it was still mainly only used by coordinators, but
| helped them do their work slightly more efficiently. We went down
| that rabbit hole for a while, but still, the artists lacked good
| tools for connecting with their PMs. Fast forward to 2016/2017
| and my team was sectioned off to completely redesign and rebuild
| the entire project management tool suite, with the help of some
| external contractors. Years went by as we did the research,
| design, technical investigations and review. It was a genuine
| real struggle to get anyone in the company to engage with us and
| talk about what they wanted in the product; they'd much rather
| just struggle on with the existing tools (including endless Excel
| sheets) and turn their focus to actually doing VFX instead. I
| left the company in 2018 amid a lot of frustration about nothing
| being progressed. I heard about 9 months later that the entire
| project had collapsed and I think they were then heading towards
| implementing ShotGun instead. Which now, ironically, is
| apparently to be renamed ShotGrid. I'm taking that as a huge
| coincidence, but it's nice to know that some of the success I had
| in that industry lives on in name alone.
| hallarempt wrote:
| Yeah, well, what Autodesk gobbles up, Autdesk turns into
| excrement...
| aaron-santos wrote:
| > The problem though, was that no-one on the team actually cared
| about growth. "Get people home in time for dinner" had to become
| something more like "get even more people home at some time".
|
| Once you see this pattern you cannot stop seeing it. It shows up
| in startups, in the video game and entertainment industries, and
| apparently used to show up a little bit at Autodesk, at least
| until the author quit. The people with non-monetary drives are
| the easiest to exploit. It makes perfect sense to a business. If
| someone is will to do more work for the same or less money it's a
| no-brainer to encourage that behavior. The end result is a bunch
| of people willing to put up with substandard pay and poor working
| conditions. Run from those industries. It never pays off. If a
| product can't be made outside of these conditions, maybe it
| doesn't deserve to exist. Survival of the fittest products and
| all.
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