RV Screening Room "Set Department"

Hi

I am not sure if this applies to the RV Screening Room at all.
I am trying to use the RV Preference “Set Department” to drive the Versions loaded to a Cut View timeline using RV Screening Room.

The use case is:

  • I am an animator.
  • I would like to see an edit with all the latest animations.
  • Any shots where there is no Anim versions published to it I would like to see the version published to the Plates Task.

So I have set a timeline and a filter to show only versions where the Task > Pipeline Step is Animation or Plates.

That works nicely, but in a Shot where there is both a Plates and an Anim version the default media added to the timeline is the latest version published (and that could be a Plates Version).

Does the Set Preferred Dept preference drives which version to pick (rather than just the latest) in RV Screening Room?

I have tried but didn’t seem to work, so I just wanted to check if this feature actually applies to my use case.
Or if there is another way to achieve this.

Many Thanks

Jacob

1 Like

Hi Jacob.

If you set your preferred department to Anim, there is one more thing you need to do to get the Anim preference working. This is a bit of an old feature, so it relies on a field called Department on Versions which has somewhat gone out of favor to tasks and pipeline steps. If you fill out the Department on your versions, it will try to match your preferred department for actions such as isolating, and updating to latest.

The crux is, these fields are not filled out by default, so with empty fields, the preferred department isn’t really doing anything.

As far as defaulting back to the Plates task version, I don’t think this feature can support that as-as. But it would make a great feature request (along with supporting pipeline steps vs the department field).

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Hi Michael

Thanks for the reply.

I actually was using the Department field on the versions.

I am also a bit confused as to how RV Screening chooses to place a version in the timeline.

In the screen-grab bellow the comp tasks have taken over the timeline (comps are green, anim yellow) although Animation was the preferred dept (set to all the versions fields).

Screenshot%20at%202019-10-08%2008-23-21

To get that point I did this:

-Launch RV SR

  • Comp And Animation filters are selected.
  • The timeline is built based on versions date (regardless of dept of task).
  • Deselect the Animation filter.
  • Select it again.

Then I get to the stage shown in the screen grab where the timeline has given priority to Comp. Not quite what I would love to achieve, but it could do for now.
Problem is that it all seems quite confusing and it wouldn’t work with more than 2 task filters.

I guess I am trying to use RV SR for something it doesn’t support.

To recap, what I would really love to be able to do is build a timeline based on a defined stack order of tasks (say 1st Comp, 2nd Anim, 3rd Live Action).
Using the filters, users can decide to build a timeline suited for their task.
For example, an animator will have Comp unchecked and the timeline will be built with Anim versions as priority over Live Action versions (and comp excluded).

Should I create a feature request here:
https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200682468-RV-Feature-Requests

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks

Jacob

3 Likes

Hey Jacob,

That sounds like a great feature. It does indeed sound like a feature request. A better place to send it would be to follow how to add it here:

1 Like