Hello Community! Just wanted to start a thread here specific to motion capture / performance capture workflows in Shotgun. I’ve seen a lot of them over the years, ranging from simple and effective to deeply complex and powerful, to a little bit crazy.
We have some built-in entities and templates around this sort of work, but I wanted to get some feedback from the community about how different studios have approached this challenge. Here are some specific questions to start the discussion, feel free to answer any or all of them based on your experience:
Which of the built-in Mocap entities in Shotgun do you use or not use? Any changes you would like to see there, or parts of the default setup you feel are missing?
How have you abstracted the concept of Mocap Shots from VFX or Cinematic Shots? Or do you treat them as the same thing and just evolve them over time as edits change? And is there any overlap with the concept of script or storyboard “Scenes” there?
What Tasks or file outputs do you not track in Shotgun? Anything that has proven to be more trouble than it is worth?
Have you setup any sort of “Shopping Cart” or ordering functionality within, or integrated with, Shotgun, that you can share?
Do you do a lot of prep work for a shoot in SG? Are you able to use SG data to generate collateral like call sheets fairly easily?
Do you use Shotgun live on set during a shoot, for tracking director’s notes, circle takes, etc.? Anything else that comes in handy on shoot day?
What is the handoff like when your work is done, to internal or external clients? Does much of your metadata travel downstream with the finished capture data?
Does your metadata live in the same SG site or Project as the downstream consumers of the capture data? Or do you have your own separate SG site or Project?
As a side note, we do have a blog post from a few years back profiling Animatrik, and how they use Shotgun to facilitate their mocap work. Great read!
Thanks in advance for sharing any thoughts or feedback here. This will not only help new teams adoption Shotgun in the mocap space, but will give our Product and Design teams some great insight into how we can support this critical industry segment even better in the future.
Hi @forcestatus, thanks for chiming in! Unfortunately as you can see, we haven’t gotten much feedback since I posted this last year. I’ll bump it today and see if we can get a little more community input.
As for using onset, I’ve see a few different applications. Most often I think, something else is used to capture data onset, and then it is synced to later through a script of some sort, or a manual CSV import. A studio I used to work at had a bar code system that they used with all physical assets/props that went into the volume. They would be scanned and associated with each Take they were used for, then all that data would get added to in a post-shoot ingest via an API script.
I’ve also worked with capture teams who had running on a touch-screen on set, and had their capture software live-update Take info in via a custom API connection. They could then mark circle takes and add notes directly in , as each Take would show up in as soon as the capture finished. They would also setup Shot lists and Shoot Days ahead of time, so they could actually print call sheets directly from a Shotgun page. Cool stuff.
I’ve also heard of studios exploring integrations between and bespoke on-set apps like Setellite, though not sure if any of those talks ever came to fruition. (If you are a studio that has done something like this and care to share, please chime in!)
I hope that’s helpful! And again, if any other clients are reading this and care to share some info with the community, it would be most appreciated.
Hi tommy,
Thanks for starting off this conversation.
At the moment our workflow is very manual and involes spreadsheets and a lot of note taking on the day. We time sinc everything and have witness refrence cameras to match up to the mocap data shoot. All this gets collected at the end of the day, on a good day and gets processed in excel and quad views processed out of premiere pro.
On the mocap side we need to record who’s wearing what suit and which take was the circle take. Sometimes we can get upto 8 actors playing a bunch of background performers within the same scene.
I’m a bit vague on all the detais it myself as I’m not fully accross it and I’m new to the team.
But I’ve watched and helpled out and know shotgun can help with all this to help inprove their pipline.
Yes this was helpful & I’ll get the team to have a read.
There are a couple of products these days, Setelite, V-Slate and some custom databases floating around.
I think the most important thing is that the data is structured logically and standardised for your studio infrastructure and workflow so its an easycleanup and import into SG/Flow.
Hi @Ricardo_Musch
I’ve used Setelite for a long time - this is what prompted my question - however, I feel it’s a little overkill these days (and expensive) since most of the data I used to collect I can easily get from the DIR. In my head I was wondering if Shotgrid could just be used instead.
If you have the data it can be imported into ShotGrid onto the Slate and Take entity respectively.
Takes can then be linked to their respective Slate(s) and both Slates and Takes can be linked to the VFX shots they are for.
If you want to get fancy you can also link the Takes individually to any Plates or Elements that are published into SG/Flow.
SG/Flow has a MocapTake entity built in which can just be renamed to Take.
Both the Slate and Take entity is pretty empty so you would have to create the required fields for your workflows.
I would advise to standardize these for the studio and make them Project agnostic so you can define one workflow and use the same workflow on every project going forward.
This then also makes it easier to built standardized tooling and workflows on top of this.
I’ve worked with studios who tied the capture software directly to SG via the API. Can then review takes and mark selects or add notes directly in SG/Flow. Can easily setup shot lists and needed assets (physical or virtual) associated with Shoot Days ahead of time as well. Can even produce call sheets this way, associating crew/talent records with Shoot Days in advance.
Hi @Ricardo_Musch, I’m currently trying to sort out a Mocap workflow for a 3D project, but it’s a new process for me. A team member referenced the Slate entity as well, they said I should attach the Mocap data to the shots by putting it into slates, but I cannot find that entity anywhere. I was able to find MocapTake, but not Slate. Any ideas?
Ah! Site Preferences! This was the page I was trying to find again. Thank you, yeah I enabled Camera and Slate. Okay, now I can try tackle this workflow suggestion.
Community! Just wanted to start a thread here specific to motion capture / performance capture workflows in Shotgun. I’ve seen a lot of them over the years, ranging from simple and effective to deeply complex and powerful, to a little bit crazy. 
I’ll bump it today and see if we can get a little more community input.
