How do I create "Shot Groups"?

Hi there,

I’ve recently moved from a very very large company to a very small one and I’m looking at trying leverage Shotgun to perform some of the functions that the in-house publishing and asset management system did in my previous job.

One of the concepts that we had in the in-house publishing system was that of “Shot Groups”.

These were a named collection of shots that generally had some similarity or repeating element and so could be worked on as a unit for more efficiency. Shots inside shot groups could potentially span multiple sequences if needed.
On disk they were like a hybrid of a sequence and and shot. They had a directory tree that was similar to a shot for storing application scene/setup files and configuration.
The publishing database was the place you needed to query for the list of shots that a group encapsulated. This mapping could change over time also.

I haven’t come across a similar concept in Shotgun just yet (I’m still learning!) perhaps it’s called something different?
But I understand Shotgun can be configured to add new Entity types that could behave this way.

Has anyone used such a concept in their Shotgun implementation?

If so, what steps would I need to take to create something similar?

Cheers
Dan

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Hi Dan,

It sounds like a shared shots library cross project. There is an old How do I shared asset between projects maybe useful.

If not, when other experts are online, you will get better answer.

Cheers

Loney

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Thanks for your reply Loney,

I’ll have a look but conceptually a Shot Group (and the shots it referred to) would only be with-in the same project.

These are used as a production efficiency tool so that you have a more organised way of saying, “these 15 shots are all of the same subject in the same lighting environment - lets assign this to one Lighting artist”.
And rather than using some email that was sent to the artist to list and remember those shots, they can be managed and assigned as a unit by the producer/coordinator/supe in Shotgun.

Most often the shots will belong to a parent sequence and in my last company Shot Groups generally always had a Sequence as a parent Entity - if that makes sense.

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Hi @BelteShazza,

I would just use the Scene entity in lieu of Shot Group, it’s a similar concept and is available and connected to the shot entity and is not part of the direct hierarchy so can span across sequences.

Check out this doc about adding additional entities and entity connections for more details if needed;

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Thanks @DavidMason,

I’ll have a look at the Scene entity and see if it can be used in a similar fashion.

Cheers
Dan

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In our current project we use the concept of parent and child shots where childs are simply pointing to their specific parent in their “Parent Shot” field. This allows grouping in SG and querying them through api.

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