I have spent a lot of time writing my own submission tool to create and upload quicktimes to shotgun with the correct format, perameters and links.
While this works very well for us, I would be interested if I could swap this out for Shotgun Create a some stage.
How flexible is Shotgun Create by now in terms of controlling the quicktime format? E.g. I potentially need different codecs (including ProRes) and burn ins for each Project (burn ins including, frame, source frame name, mov name, various custom notes that an artist can enter).
Is or will this be possible, or is it asking too much?
Thanks for the question, At the moment your list above: burn-ins per Project & Prores isn’t possible to control in Create. Both of them are requests we’ve seen in the past and are keeping our eyes on.
A couple of questions for you…
For Prores, when and where would you want to set that compression information? For example, is this something where you want to put image sequences in, and then transcode to a Prores version as well as a web playable version?
For the burn ins, similar question, how do you envision that working, does someone admin the template, and then on upload we automatically create the burn-in?
Interesting that this is being talked about. If I imagine being able to drag/drop EXRs into Create and being usable for the pipeline down the road, there is a lot it must be doing for this to work.
Currently, our workflow is to take renders from Deadline, our render farm manager, and put them through our code that generates movs on the farm as a part of the submission to Shotgun process. The requrements are very diverse - different shows, sequences and render types shots have different resolutions, color spaces, burnin/slate needs, so we are reading presets and defaults from a JSON file that lists all the params for a certain shot and render template, and config the mov processor with these.
Thanks for the reply @Kevin, and sorry for the delay, I didn’t get an email notification until Hristo replied for some reason.
Below is a screen shot of our current tool which allows for setting the shot context as well as the related task. The “Preset” field lists custom entities in Shotgun that define how the frame sequence should be converted to create a quicktime. Essentially this just points to a Nuke template that is setup with the default burn ins as well as the required output (e.g. prores). The burn in options in the panel are for the artist to (optionally) fill in.
On the current show we need editorial to download a usable offline quicktime from Shotgun, which is why we decided to upload prores, rather than a smaller h264 or something. Obviously that changes from show to show.
Currently we only use two presets, one for comp submissions which looks up the correct look lut via the exr metadata, and anotehr one for cg renders, which don’t get the look lut or the burn ins.
Thanks for the feedback, this is super helpful and makes tons of sense. I’ll add this to our notes. We’re starting to look at how studios can control the behavior or the +Version button in Create and talking about how we can bring more consistency to the version submission process across the different paths a user can take.
I’m at Siggraph at the moment, so if I run into any other questions about this, I’ll post an update after. Thanks again!
Cheers,
Kevin
