I’m the Dir of VFX and pipeline lead at LVLY Studios in NYC. Mostly a TVC shop, but recently getting into the long-form world. Been using NIM for a year, and now switching over to Shotgun. Our VFX team is based around Flame.
First two questions I have about Shotgun:
We are working on a show that has two LUTs per shot, a show LUT and a per shot .ccc. Is there a way to log these into Shotgun so that the appropriate LUTs are applied when a clip is reviewed? Not talking about RV - just reveiwing within the web interface.
My QC team currently uses this workflow to QC a shot - They load 3 sequences into After Effects:
The orig pull
The approved version of the comp
The wpix/roughcut.
Then they step through the shot and toggle the 3 layers off and on. Is it possible with Shotgun and/or RV to do this all within Shotgun or RV? I saw that in RV you can load two clips and compare using over/difference, etc. Curious to see if you can add a third. Also curious to know if you can build a “QC button” for each shot that will load the wpix and orig pull in with the latest version - provided that they are all logged into Shotgun.
Hey @amilkis, thanks for posting, and welcome to the forums! Since you have some specific SG-related questions in here, I moved your post over to the Shotgun category. Feel free to post another intro in the Introductions thread if you like! Just didn’t want your questions to get lost there.
Now for your questions:
No support for applying external LUTs via the web UI unfortunately. I have seen clients set up some automation about tracking and applying LUTs in RV via Shotgun though. If any of those clients are reading this thread, would love to hear details of the approach you have implemented!
Yes, you can compare more than 2 elements in RV, so that might be a workflow to look into. There is more info in the RV docs.
Assuming Shotgun knows where to find each of these versions, I would imagine you could create an Action Menu Item to launch them in RV in comparison mode. I’ll let someone a little more engineering-savvy weigh in to be sure though.
Assuming you are using Nuke for transcoding quicktimes prior to uploading Versions to SG, you can -
impliment your own method for assigning show and shot luts to shot entities (eg you could have a file/url field in your project/sequence entities and shot entities, for the show and shot luts respectively). You could even use custom ‘colour specification’ entities and use a entity field in your project/sequence/shot.
customise the reviewsubmission app (the nukescript) and add the required OCIO transform nodes, with expressions driven by environment variables. (or use your custom OCIO profile if you have that setup)
On submitting reviewsubmission jobs, you pass the lut paths from your show and shot entities for the current context to the env vars which then get picked up by the OCIO nodes in the custom nukescript described above.
If transcoding on the farm you’ll want to pass the env vars to the render nodes.
Broad brushtrokes I know, but you should get the gist.
Now you have your full colour workflow baked in, you;ll be asking how to setup RV to handle having quicktimes and image sequences playing nicely together; eg media with colour profiles baked in and raw media…
If anyone in Autodesk / Shotgrid are listening please make a tutorial on how to do this. I’m sure many small vendors with no pipeline dept need exactly this and are currently manually loading & burning in LUTs.
