Work In Progress Publishes

[tokejepsen]

Hey,

This is something I've been struggling to figure out a good workflow for.

What I'm talking about here is assets that are in a stage of progress, and not yet approved by a supervisor. As an example let's take an image sequence. The image sequence has been rendered, and the artist has reviewed the sequence. It still needs to be approved by the supervisor before anyone starts to use the image sequence.

In order for the supervisor to view the image sequence, they will either have to know where the image sequence is or the pipeline will have to make assumptions about where it is. The problem is that you are not utilizing Ftrack as the database that it is, and you could get into a lot of problems if you are talking about multiple locations.

You could publish the image sequence to Ftrack, so its easy to review and there is a record of where it is. This would utilize Ftrack as a database, and you could make good use of the locations framework. This is works great for the first version of an asset, because nobody else in the pipeline is using the asset. The problem comes when you iterate on an asset, while other people are using the asset down the pipeline.
If we continue with the image sequence example, once the image sequence is rendered from the lighting artist and approved by the supervisor, the compositor grabs the asset and starts working. Later there are updates to the image sequence, which the lighting artist amends and publishes a new version of the image sequence. Now we are in a problem stage where the image sequence the lighting artist published is not approved by the supervisor, but once the compositor opens Nuke they'll get notification about the new version of the image sequence.

Has anyone else had this issue? What would Ftrack's recommended workflow?

[Mattias Lagergren]

For a workflow question like this it would be interesting to hear other peoples experience and workflows.

One approach would be to work with statuses to handle this scenario:

1. Image sequence is published and gets a Pending Review status (In progress state).
2. Image sequence is reviewed by Supervisor and gets Rejected (Blocked state) or Internally approved (Done state).

Then of course the tools and integration should pick this up (not supported in current integration ftrack - Nuke).

[tokejepsen]

That sounds like a good idea!

As you say the main problem is that the integrations will pick up on any asset version updates, so a way of filtering what gets picked up would be awesome.