Submit for Review from Flame: Workflow suggestions?

Pipeline Integrations
1

Trying to wrap my head around submitting a comp for review in Flame. On its face, the workflow seems pretty simple - just right click on something in the media panel and select “Submit for ShotGrid review…”. However, this doesn’t seem to work, at all. It looks like it attempts to render out a QuickTime movie to a temp file, and then errors, saying it can’t find the file. At the very least, I’d need this to work, hah hah!

This is what I’d like the SG Export to do.

  1. Take the image sequence rendered out of Batch, and add a slate at the head, using the description entered into the SG Export dialog as slate notes, with proper timecode relative to the first frame of the batch output
  2. Export the resulting EXR image sequence to the file system
  3. Build an arbitrary number of movie files from the EXR source for Editorial QuickTimes and VFX Quicktimes - example Avid DNxHD QuickTime movie for Editorial, and H.264 QuickTime file for VFX review, but could include additional movie files
  4. Apply color management ( shot-specific CDL, show LUT ) to the above movie files
  5. Publish all the outputs in a context-aware fashion, i.e. linked to the appropriate shot and task
  6. Create a Version with sg_path_to_frames and sg_path_to_movie fields populated, and upload the VFX QuickTime to SG for streaming media review

Has anyone done anything like this before? I’m guessing I need to likely re-write a bunch of hooks for the flame export app, but was hoping for some guidance before I get started.

2

Perhaps a better question for Autodesk support? Or logik.tv?

3

I think you’ll want to take a look at how you want to build this functionality.

If you have multiple software that output image sequences that need to be “daillied” with burins, colorspace conversions etc to create your outputs then you may want to develop or get something that is independent from flame.

I created a set of products that use Deadline to apply ShotGrid data to Slates and Burnins and use Nuke under the hood to render the daillies output.
Working to upgrade this to not be dependent on a Nuke render license by using OIIO and some other tools.

But that system can take output from any Source DCC and will render and upload the dallies in a uniform way.

And you could create some custom entities in SG to link the various deliverables you require and spawn the jobs from that.

really much of what you describe above comes down first to laying out your requirements, figuring out if these may be universal to multiple projects/dcc’s and then how you would build this tool/set of tools that do the job reliably without having to constantly change code.

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@Ricardo_Musch thank you for the thoughtful response! What I need to do here is basically take an EXR image sequence of arbitrary resolution and colorspace, create a slate frame for it, and render that out to the filesystem as frame number start frame - 1. From there, I need to take that slated EXR image sequence, apply shot-specific CDL files and project look LUT(s), and write out movie files in various formats; typically two QuickTime movies, one in DNxHD 115 for Editorial, and the other in ProRes 422 for VFX department viewing.

I implemented this in Nuke by writing a bunch of custom hooks for SG’s tk-nuke Publisher. It takes slate notes as input from the user, and then uses a template Nuke script that renders out the EXR slate frame along with however many QuickTimes I need for that particular project.

I love the elegance of your solution, in that it’s DCC software package independent. For me, I needed something to work in Nuke, so I wrote it in a hurry just to get stuff out the door, and I never thought about it much, other than slight tweaks when a new project came in.

Now, on Flame, I’ve gone back to entirely manual slate generation - like, I wrote a generic batch script that makes a slate, and it has to be modified each time I submit. From there, I bring the EXR sequence with slate back in to Flame, apply CDL and Look LUT, and export out twice - once for the Avid QuickTime, and again for the VFX QuickTime.

Super time-consuming and error prone.

I know that SG has the submit for review app that is available in Flame. I could modify the publisher hook in Flame to add submit for review as a plugin, and have it generate the slate and QuickTimes, which I believe it does with some combination of OIIO tool and FFmpeg?

Alternatively, there is the context menu “ShotGrid Export…” that can be used on a clip or sequence, but this doesn’t appear to do anything but make a version? Perhaps it could be enhanced to add a slate and make additional delivery formats?

Is there a benefit to either using Flame’s ShotGrid export or tweaking the publisher for what I need? I’m guessing tweaking the publisher would be preferred, since it’s DCC independent?