Non-reviewable Assets

[Milan Kolar]

Not sure how else to calls this, but basically I'd like to start a discussion about assets/version/published (whatever you wanna call it), that are not subject to review. We have a lot of things that are 'pure data publishes' and reviewing them doesn't make much sense, or it's done between artists themselves. Take a model for example, we go through approval process in terms of looks but after that, there might be another 10 versions of back and forth between modeler and rigger to get it technically correct. Supervisor doesn't want to be dealing with minor tech fixes (and often really doesn't need to), but new versions of this model keep popping up for him. 

The same is true for tracked cameras, rig tweaks that animators request, work scenes etc... 

The point is that the way I see it, there are 2 types of assets, 'reviewables' and 'data'. Right now the way we deal with this is setting a version status to 'file' which indicates, that its just there to be used, not reviewed. However that is far from ideal for plethora of reasons.

I'm wondering if anyone else has these problems, or if we're just thinking about it differently than everyone else. 

Another aspect to this is marking which version is 'current'. As we all know, it often happens, that a version 15 get's approved and 3 days later someone decides that v012 was actually better. One way to save this info is of course 'un-approving' v015 and approving v012 again, so everyone knows what is currently considered the best for production.  In practice this is difficult to keep on top of and very often we end up with 5 approved versions and it's tricky to figure out which is 'THE' approved version. It would be lovely to have an option of an exclusive checkbox style attribute on asset version, that simply states the master version to use. That way we could keep statuses for review purposes (nice to know at the end, that we approved 15 version of something  ) and have this attribute to inform everyone about the latest and greatest.

 

I do realise that this is slightly convoluted post, but let's be honest. Versions and published files is a convoluted topic by definition so let's try and untangle it a bit. Any workflow suggestions are welcome and will certainly help others too.

[tokejepsen]

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Not sure how else to calls this, but basically I'd like to start a discussion about assets/version/published (whatever you wanna call it), that are not subject to review. We have a lot of things that are 'pure data publishes' and reviewing them doesn't make much sense, or it's done between artists themselves. Take a model for example, we go through approval process in terms of looks but after that, there might be another 10 versions of back and forth between modeler and rigger to get it technically correct. Supervisor doesn't want to be dealing with minor tech fixes (and often really doesn't need to), but new versions of this model keep popping up for him. 

Could you outline what the Supervisor is currently doing? I'm a bit confused as to why the Supervisor gets notified of tech fixes.

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Another aspect to this is marking which version is 'current'. As we all know, it often happens, that a version 15 get's approved and 3 days later someone decides that v012 was actually better. One way to save this info is of course 'un-approving' v015 and approving v012 again, so everyone knows what is currently considered the best for production.  In practice this is difficult to keep on top of and very often we end up with 5 approved versions and it's tricky to figure out which is 'THE' approved version. It would be lovely to have an option of an exclusive checkbox style attribute on asset version, that simply states the master version to use. That way we could keep statuses for review purposes (nice to know at the end, that we approved 15 version of something  ) and have this attribute to inform everyone about the latest and greatest.

How come you aren't just republishing the old version?

[Milan Kolar]

6 minutes ago, tokejepsen said:

Could you outline what the Supervisor is currently doing? I'm a bit confused as to why the Supervisor gets notified of tech fixes.

Apart from working on own shots and assets, he watches versions that get published (filtering to 'pending review' status) so he can review them. That's why we use the 'file' status on things that shouldn't reach him. I just feel that versions view is cluttered with lots of 'files'. 

 

9 minutes ago, tokejepsen said:

How come you aren't just republishing the old version?

You mean republish v012 as v016 for instance?(related to my example above) Firstly because of disk space, We're always fighting for that (could be solved with hard/symlinks possibly), another reason is the fact that it's and extra action that seems a bit unnecessary if we already have a version with that content. 

 

Doing all this with statuses works, it's just inconvenient. Plus it's also a case of having to change statuses on multiple asset versions. Example: Animator publishes a shot. He creates assets of types 'cache', 'camera', and 'animation' (the last one would have the review quicktime and the scene components). When shot get's approved, all of these need to have status updated. It can be done with event server, but it's not particularly pleasant.

 

 

[tokejepsen]

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Apart from working on own shots and assets, he watches versions that get published (filtering to 'pending review' status) so he can review them. That's why we use the 'file' status on things that shouldn't reach him. I just feel that versions view is cluttered with lots of 'files'. 

How come he is seeing other versions? Is the status "pending review" not exclusive to a supervisor?

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You mean republish v012 as v016 for instance?(related to my example above) Firstly because of disk space, We're always fighting for that (could be solved with hard/symlinks possibly), another reason is the fact that it's and extra action that seems a bit unnecessary if we already have a version with that content. 

Could you not just have the assetversion v016 in ftrack, which components are pointing to v012? Maybe that'll get a bit messing, but in theory since you are publishing, the files won't get overwritten.
Would be a problem if an artist needs to do some work on v016, but I assuming when further work is needed you would version up.

[Mattias Lagergren]

On 5/24/2016 at 3:20 PM, Milan Kolar said:

Another aspect to this is marking which version is 'current'. As we all know, it often happens, that a version 15 get's approved and 3 days later someone decides that v012 was actually better. One way to save this info is of course 'un-approving' v015 and approving v012 again, so everyone knows what is currently considered the best for production.  In practice this is difficult to keep on top of and very often we end up with 5 approved versions and it's tricky to figure out which is 'THE' approved version. It would be lovely to have an option of an exclusive checkbox style attribute on asset version, that simply states the master version to use. That way we could keep statuses for review purposes (nice to know at the end, that we approved 15 version of something  ) and have this attribute to inform everyone about the latest and greatest.

I see your point but I wonder if the solution is to have a master checkbox, or if that just complicates it. You would have to check for and handle both Approved and Master. Perhaps consider an event trigger that listens for a "status change to Approved" and then change the status on all others to "Rejected" or something like that.

On 5/24/2016 at 3:56 PM, Milan Kolar said:

Apart from working on own shots and assets, he watches versions that get published (filtering to 'pending review' status) so he can review them. That's why we use the 'file' status on things that shouldn't reach him. I just feel that versions view is cluttered with lots of 'files'. 

Yeah - I think what you say is a common approach, to have everything published as WIP (or something) and when you want your supervisor to review something you set the status to Pending review. The supervisor has a view in the Versions page with a status filter to only see what is pending review.

It would be interesting to hear how others tackle this issue and if there is anything we can do to simplify things

[Milan Kolar]

5 hours ago, Mattias Lagergren said:

I see your point but I wonder if the solution is to have a master checkbox, or if that just complicates it.

It does complicate it a bit. The thing is, that we actually find the information and all approved versions quite useful. It's good to see what has been approved throughout the life of an asset. Anyways I've added the master checkbox now and it's working quite well. Might rethink it later on though :).

 

 

[Mattias Lagergren]

23 hours ago, Milan Kolar said:

On 5/26/2016 at 10:50 AM, Mattias Lagergren said:

 

It does complicate it a bit. The thing is, that we actually find the information and all approved versions quite useful. It's good to see what has been approved throughout the life of an asset. Anyways I've added the master checkbox now and it's working quite well. Might rethink it later on though :).

Ah yes, perhaps a special status "Previously approved"? Anyways, let me know how it evolves!