First, let me say: I realized just this week that I’m truly over the name change and Autodesk feels natural. Maybe it was the sheer, wasabi-colored curtains floating around the booth that gave it that reassuringly Discreet-hip vibe. Maybe also the poker card swag with the old symbols, those tribal fish and branch graphics, paired with hefty poker chips.

But on to news and business. The user group was SRO at about 1500 souls. There to see, among other things, scaleable InfiniBand workflow blending multi-core HP workstations, the Discreet-legacy apps, plus things like Toxik, Backdraft and the new Incinerator accelerator which allows real-time digital 2K color grading for Lustre, and enables highly interactive sessions. (EFilm’s already signed up to deploy a custom version of the Lustre/Incinerator as part of their Eworks). The new stuff is all part of an ongoing Autodesk push to put decades of know how about processing and IT to work. Maurice Patel describes it as “leveraging the raw performance of modern IT and translating it for media requirements.”

Remember GPU acceleration from a few Siggraphs ago? It kind of faded away–it was hard to do apparently. But Autodesk stuck with it and can now show the fruits of that labor, for example running plug-ins on Lustre HD, following through on last year’s IBC introduction. Likewise the Autodesk background in multi-threaded apps (something SGIs were good for) puts the company ahead of the multi-core curve; it gives them a way to raise the high-end bar, even as more democratic apps are still rewriting code.

But highend is relative. We also talk about the disappearing demarcation between production and post–something only Lucas and Jackson could afford. Now Autodesk is bringing some of that seamlessness into parallel workflows that blur the line not only between production and post but among editing and visual effects, 2D and 3D, compositing and finishing. Their technology demo conjured the image of this kind of bi-directional workflow that allows modern IT-type versioning and parallel workflow exchange to occur with big media files. Can’t happen fast enough for the user group who seemed…let’s call it, keen.

The Autodesk subscription service that launched at IBC rewarded the 97% uptake among users with NAB extensions to every major Autodesk product. The idea is to do more, smaller releases, and to create a more predictable cash/expense flow for users and for Autodesk R&D. The baseline of subscriber fees gives Autodesk a starting point for budgeting R&D; the annual regularity of the charge helps users budget as opposed to scramble mid-fiscal for money to buy a major new upgrade. (You can still do that too by the way).

The other across-the-line news is Lustre Color, a new color management capability in partnership with Arri that delivers common LUTS (94 of them) and calibration to all the systems products–so users are seeing and approving the same color values across the line. Also allows users to select and convert to a common color space–log or lin.

Autodesk is pulling performance out of a lot of different pots right now, in some cases making use of legacy and experience that seem newly relevant on the space/time continuum of content creation technology.