Has anyone here used Shotgun for tracking drives and/or other physical assets coming into and out of a studio?
Thanks,
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I have seen that use case in practice - complete with bar code. But it’s been a few years so I don’t recall the details.
I’m pretty sure you’d want a non-Project custom entity and then add some multi entity Fields to shots or reels or whatever you’re tracking.
I’m also interested to how it’s implemented if anyone can share.
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I think the Delivery Entity can be configured to accommodate physical stuff.
Though regarding tracking physical assets using barcodes with SG, I believe Laika has a lot of experience. Perhaps @taiello can give us some hints.
Cheers,
-Doc
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Thanks for the mention, Doc! We experimented with barcodes, but ended up not going that direction. There are many user stories around this topic; one of the top ones is just tracking where within the studio a particular Asset has moved – like, a RP-printed face, or a puppet, or a puppet’s prop, etc. These things start in one construction shop and move through many shops before hopefully ending up on the right shooting stage… and then moving onto another stage, and into the puppet hospital, then over to costume where the puppet may get re-dressed, back onto another stage, eventually into archive / storage, maybe loaned out for a marketing tour, etc!
We’re now using RFID. We’ve added an sg_rfid field on about a half-dozen entities in the shotgun database. We spent a bunch of time experimenting with RFID readers to connect to mobile devices. The idea is to have scanners at key entries and exits of various locations, as well as with “librarian” type folks, to do an RFID-based check-in / check-out system. We’ve got that all tied into a map-system of the studio floor and stages, so that you can pull up a map and see all the assets all over it, then filter-down to just the asset you’re looking for and go “oh hey! it’s over on stage 13, when it’s supposed to be over on stage 27.”
A plug for the Shotgunners: the REST API proved massively helpful with this process, since there are usually no python interfaces to this type of scanner equipment nor their APIs. The REST API even enabled us to have CAM (computer-aided-manufacturing) machines exchange information with Shotgun.
Dunno if that helps. I guess the point is that yes you certainly can use Shotgun for tracking locations of physical assets.
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