Moving ahead with achieving its vision for cloud-based production system for M&E, Autodesk has announced the acquisition of Moxion for an undisclosed price. Currently headquartered in LA, Moxion was founded in New Zealand in 2015. Moxion offers cloud-based platform to filmmakers for reviewing digital dailies. Rushes or digital dailies are unedited prints of a film from a day’s shooting. The digital dailies are sent to the creative heads for reviewing and resolving the issues, deploying resources where needed, maintaining shooting schedule, etc. With the Moxion acquisition, Autodesk is moving beyond post-production to on-set production.
At AU 2021, Autodesk had unveiled plans for its M&E division’s evolution to cloud-based workflows. The acquisition of Tangent Labs formed one piece of the M&E puzzle. Diana Colella, SVP Media & Entertainment, Autodesk, said, “Moxion accelerates our vision for production in the cloud, building on our recent acquisition of Tangent Labs.”
The company press release is as follows:
Autodesk acquires Moxion Cloud Solution for digital dailies
Deal expands Autodesk’s platform for media and entertainment industry upstream to include on-set production workflows.
Today Autodesk announced the acquisition of Moxion, the New Zealand-based developer of a powerful, cloud-based platform for digital dailies used by leading filmmakers on some of the world’s most complex and challenging productions, including “The Midnight Sky,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and “The Matrix Resurrections.” The acquisition of Moxion’s talent and technology will expand Autodesk’s own cloud platform for Media and Entertainment upstream, moving beyond post-production into production, bringing new users to Autodesk while helping better integrate processes across the entire content production chain.
Founded in 2015, Moxion has rapidly become a leading cloud technology player in the M&E industry, winning accolades that include 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 established itself as a leader in secure digital dailies workflows. The company enables professionals to 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 and with studio-grade security, reducing rework. Data protection is paramount at Moxion, ensuring security with features like MPAA compliance, multi-factor authentication, visible and invisible forensic watermarking and full digital rights management.
“As the content demand continues to boom with pressure on creators to do more for less, this acquisition helps us facilitate broader collaboration and communication, and drive greater efficiencies in the production process, saving time and money,” said Diana Colella, SVP Media & Entertainment, Autodesk. “Moxion accelerates our vision for production in the cloud, building on our recent acquisition of Tangent Labs.”
“We look forward to combining the efforts of our talented team with the deep resources and wealth of engineering talent at Autodesk to give customers new Moxion features and integrations,” said Hugh Calveley, CEO, Moxion. “Bringing together industry leading on-set and post-production workflows will help unite data and increase collaboration across the production process to improve project efficiency.”
Aaron Morton, a cinematographer who has worked on projects including “Orphan Black,” “Black Mirror,” “American Gods,” and Amazon’s new “The Lord of the Rings” series used Moxion for several projects.
“It’s never fun when decisions are being formed about your work if the dailies aren’t the way you wanted them to look,” said Morton, NZCS. “With Moxion, it’s what I see on the set, and the decisions I make with the dailies colorist always play out so that production people and producers are seeing what I want them to see. The images are very true to what we see while we’re shooting.”
The Moxion acquisition expands Autodesk’s customer base upstream, moving beyond post-production to on-set production, a critical point in the film and television production process. This is when the bulk of raw production data is generated, and creative decisions are made that have significant impact downstream during post-production.
The transaction closed during Autodesk’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, ending January 31, 2022, and will have no material impact on Autodesk’s fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 guidance presented on November 23, 2021.
