Publishing & Retaining Folder Structures

[fooopa]

Hi there,

I recently switched away from Ftrack to Shotgun because the publishing tools seems so broken and limited in Ftrack.  Shotgun does it much better, but the program as a whole is terrible and a pain to use.  Ftrack is far superior when it comes to ease of use - with the excepting of publishing.  I quickly switched back to Ftrack and now have to figure out a solution to my issue.

Both programs seem to have terrible documentation and I can't figure this out.  We have a small studio and I am a VFX supervisor.  We have a pipeline that works perfectly for a studio our size and I don't want to mess around with it too much.  My issue is that Ftrack seems to be be very rigid when it comes to publishing files.  It wants to create it's own file structure which in my opinion is a complete disaster.  I'm really not sure how anyone works this way.  I want the artists to be able to submit shots for review that retain the naming convention of the shot they submitted, and retain the path on our server to the shot.  I want to open a group of shots submitted throughout the day in RV - launched from Ftrack and review, annotate and make notes from within RV (on the original shots) that then get transferred to the shot tasks for the artist to see.  Pretty straightforward.  What I don't want is for Ftrack to copy the shot to some other location on my server, place it in a folder within a folder within a folder within a folder within a folder and rename the file "movie.mov".  

Before I ask how I can do this, I'm just wondering if someone can just give me a straight up answer if this is even possible.  We've spent days trying to solve this.  There are very few but broad and unhelpful documents about publishing, but otherwise the internet seems to be devoid of any useful help on this issue.

Thank you so much for your help!  

cheers,

Mike Ritchie

 

 

[Lorenzo Angeli]

Hi @fooopa and welcome back to ftrack

folder structure is somewhat tricky to generalise for every user case, that's why our is customizable from the end users to fit their needs.
You can find a complete example in the ftrack-recipes repo, from there you'll be able to decide how and where files will be stored and named.
Keep the location's api documentation at hand while looking into the code as it might come at hand for the terminology.

If you feel like ftrack is limited for what concerns interaction and customisation,
please keep in mind that any operation with ftrack entities can be driven through event system:
In the same recipes repository, you can find a good example on how to create an action that extracts data and produce a downloadable  excel file.

If you have any issue or doubt with it please let us know.

Cheers.

L.
 

 

[Martin Pengelly-Phillips]

Quote

I'm just wondering if someone can just give me a straight up answer if this is even possible

Yes it is possible. You can configure ftrack to not manage your files or copy them to new paths. Instead it can just use whatever path the files already have  Typically this is known as an unmanaged location in ftrack terminology. The ftrack support team should be able to help guide you more in setting this up.