Linking shots to episodes?

Hello all just a quick question. We started a new episodic project here and just noticed something interesting. Seems as though when trying to make a new shot its kind of confusing trying to link to a sequence under an episode. And what I mean is we may have episode 1 and sequence 10 then episode 2 and sequence 10. When I try to link a shot in the GUI I go to link to a sequence and I see two sequences named 10 but don’t know which one belongs to episode 1 and which to episode 2. See the screen shot below. Is there a better way to handle this other then trying to name sequences with the episode indication in the sequence name?
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Hi @jkiser,

I can see how that is confusing. In Shotgun, as a best practice, consider naming things in the way your project is structured so it’s easier to read autocomplete and search results.

For instance, with a typical VFX workflow, Shots are organized into Sequences, and Assets are linked to Shots. To keep things organized, you’ll have a sequence name, and then your Shots have an added sequence prefix. So if “Rock” and “Ocean” are the sequences names, Shots will have those as a prefix, and will look like this: rock_001, rock_002, rock_003, ocean_001, ocean_002, etc.

For a typical Episodic workflow, there’s another layer of prefixes since our Shots are organized into Sequences and then Sequences are organized into Episodes. In this case, naming conventions for an Episode may look something like this

  • Episodes are named like: Ep001, Ep002, Ep003
  • Sequences have the episode prefix : Ep001_jup, Ep002_sat, Ep003_mar
  • Shots have both Episodic and Sequence prefixes: Ep001_jup_001, Ep001_jup_002, etc.

If you have an Episodic schema without Sequences where Shots are linked directly to Episodes, then just remove the sequence prefix

  • Episodes: Ep001_jup_001
  • Shots: Ep001_001

Does that help clear things up a bit?

Cheers,
Shayna

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Hello Shaynad thanks for getting back to me. Yes as I said we certainly can name things with the prefixing of sequences but that kind of takes flexibility from the system. Lets say if we need to rename a sequence we would then have to subsequently rename each shot of the sequence to then reflect the new sequence name even though the sequence is linked. It seems like it would be way more intuitive if the system when creating a new shot displayed all sequences of the requested name and their corresponding episodes. This way the creator could make the new shot and the correct association with the sequence and episode and all entity linking would be preserved. Then if I needed to rename a sequence no shots would have to be renamed. Or if I renamed an episode I dont have to go in and change all sequence names to reflect the new episode name and all shots ect ect.

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Hi @jkiser,

Sound like an interesting feature request, check out this post;

On how to submit to our product board.

-David

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