I want to propose renaming Shotgun’s Version entity to something more fitting, because it really does not hit any definition of “Version”. Everyone I met so far was (or still is) confused by it, till they were able to wrap their head around it.
So “Version”, to me, can mean one of two things:
Creating a incremental backup of whatever you are working on. (“I saved a new version of my work file.”)
Creating a variation of something. (“I created a version of that tree. So now we have treeA and treeB.”)
So where does Shotgun’s “Version” fit in there? I think nowhere. A Shotgun Version is a movie or image that can be reviewed ( a Reviewable Media) . That’s it. Yes, it can be connected to some sort of Version, but that is not a good reason for naming it that way.
I know very well that this is not trivial to change and it implies a lot of cumbersome hacks or workarounds.
The point of this proposal is to check if I am the only person who gets annoyed by this or if there are enough people who feel the same way.
Users at my studio have certainly stumbled over the name largely as Shogun is new for us and it’s taken time to adapt to the new terminology. I can understand where you’re coming from and don’t hate the idea. But at the same time, it’s also so ingrained for some that it would be an issue.
Thanks for your input @laldridge and @luke! You confirmed what I already thought. This proposal is deemed to fail. But since it annoys me for some time, I had to get it off my chest.
I like that this has been brought up. As somebody who has used Shotgun for over 10 years it is second nature to me but I do observe nearly (if not every new user) stumbling across this. However, once I expain that shots have versions just like in any company’s workflow out there (e.g. beauty_v003, cg_bash_v010, comp_v011 etc), nearly everybody is confused about why they were confused in the first place
For me this points to a UI challenge more than the terminology. When I look at people getting around Shotgun the first time, the reason they seem to get confused is the fact that the Version page looks like the Shots page in most cases (until people redesign it of course). I think there is a lot of room for improvement on that level, which will make the terminology snap into place easier.
In my mind the term “Version” is not quite as off the mark as @Fabian reckons though. To use your own example, in our workflow a version matches alomst exactly your definition in the original post:
“a incremental backup of whatever you are working on”
It’s not necessarily a “backup” so much as a visual iteration, where sometimes no more than one iteration is expected (plates, reference clips).
So yeah, I am interested in seeing this thread evolve a bit more seeing “versions” are the meat and bones of most Shotgun sites, so thanks for bringing this up!
Thanks for your opinion on this! I also see a lot of room for improvement on Shotguns GUI!
On second thought I think what bothers me on this that “Version” is giving the impression that it contains more than it does. As you say it is a “visual iteration” based on some file. But if you say “I uploaded a Version to Shotgun” it leaves the impression that you uploaded the file itself to Shotgun. Which in turn leaves the impression that Shotgun is some sort of backup system.
I am exaggerating here, but definitely had artist in the past who thought this way.
As a little prove of my thinking I will take the recently added “tk-multi-reviewsubmission”. If you called that “tk-multi-versionsubmission” it would be way more confusing, wouldn’t it? Or switch the menu entry from “Send to review” to “Send Version” and you maybe get what I mean.
Don’t know if I am talking myself into a corner here, but it is fun discussing about it.
Hi @Fabian, I totally agree. It’s really eye opening when new artists start using Shotgun. There are always so many great questions/suggestions as they aren’t biased by long term use and habit.
UI improvements and slight name changes like you are suggesting would go a loooong way to making Shotgun a lot more intuitive (I personally quite like “Revsion” instead of “Version”).
A partner company recently made a clever little Google Spreadsheet to track a small project, and looking at how they laid it out immidiately made me want to redesign my shot pages in Shotgun to mimic it. But the page designer is to rigid to achieve this so I fell back on my habits again.
I very much hope there will be a solid UX revision some time in the near future.
Fair enough, bring on the UI/UX improvements then
It feels a bit like the browser UX has been a bit neglected a bit in favour of the Toolkit apps (which we don’t use).
Gotta admit the use of “version” to refer to a media take is something that’s bugged me for a while as well, and for many of the same reasons. Most studio pipelines “version” generally refers to DCC file versioning which (depending on the facility) can frequently be done totally independently of submitting media for review, so overloading the term like this has a tendency to lead to miscommunication. Personally I’m more used to “takes” to refer to the reviewables.
