Hello
Just curious as to what some people’s workflows are when it comes to longform work. I’m mainly interested in the back end of the process.
I seem to be doing a lot of series at the moment which needs multiple exports for different versions, it feels like it’s getting bottlenecked as I can’t get it out the flame quick enough.
Are other people coming across anything similar and are there any options to spread the load more? If I have an assist machine or another flame would it be easy enough for those to do the exports to get multiples out at the same time? Any hiccups with this? If this is the case do you have dedicated assistants who would do this work?
I’m asking this in quite a broad way, trying to plan/push for changes in how we do things and am quite open to ideas.
Cheers. R
Talk a little bit about staffing. Who else is on your team and do they have access to Macs?
I work for a longform post house, all flames are on Linux and we don’t have any Mac flames. All of those who use the flames have their own jobs to do so we can’t use them to double up on exports unfortunately
A few rambles…I mean, thoughts…to start the conversation.
Have you ever missed a deadline because of this? Have any of your clients been put under scheduling pressure because of this? Does your workflow cause extra overtime? Do you get paid overtime? Are you the only one on your team feeling/experiencing this? How large is the flame team? Is it flat, structure wise, as in, ya got a flame and someone in front of it all the time, with similar experience/salaries? Is your facility small, medium, or large? Is your hardware up to date and fast? Any recent technical challenges…slower storage, increase in show volume, increase in file size, increase in deliverables, increase in mezzanine master complexity? Are you working remote? Is that slowing stuff down? How many hours/days does your export(s) take? Have you looked into Python for calling lots of Export Presets at once? Are you exporting in the foreground or background? If foreground, why? If background, can you stack your work to start background exports early? Are you doing multi-frame rate / multi-standard exports? Or is everything one size/one frame rate?
Sorry. I love this stuff.
Thought the easiest way would be to answer each question with your reply put into mine, thank you for your reply though. I’m starting to think it’s more down to bad scheduling!
Have you ever missed a deadline because of this? Not missed a deadline, although I’d say deadlines and jobs have had to be moved to allow for outputting.
Have any of your clients been put under scheduling pressure because of this? I don’t believe so but our post producers shield us from a lot of this.
Does your workflow cause extra overtime? It can do.
Do you get paid overtime? No.
Are you the only one on your team feeling/experiencing this? No, there’s maybe 3 of us that this affects more then the others.
How large is the flame team? We have a core team of 6 ops.
Is it flat, structure wise, as in, ya got a flame and someone in front of it all the time, with similar experience/salaries? Yes, each person basically at the same level but all of us in front of our own machines.
Is your facility small, medium, or large? Large I’d say.
Is your hardware up to date and fast? Hardware is quick and up to date.
Any recent technical challenges…slower storage, increase in show volume, increase in file size, increase in deliverables, increase in mezzanine master complexity? I’d say it’s increase in deliverables across all flames, so more shows for SVOD which then has more deliverables because of this.
Are you working remote? A mixture of both.
Is that slowing stuff down? Remote working is definitely slower but it makes up for time in other areas.
How many hours/days does your export(s) take? It can vary, we’re not talking days but I think the issue is more that you have a full days work on a show and then you’re expected to get a NAM out on the evening but then you’ve also got exports for the show you’re working on as well.
Have you looked into Python for calling lots of Export Presets at once? No, I’d need a lot of help with this I think.
Are you exporting in the foreground or background? Foreground
If foreground, why? A lot of shows we work on have crops on the timeline or a colormanagement, with background I’d have to render these before exporting but with foreground I wouldn’t need to.
If background, can you stack your work to start background exports early? n/a
Are you doing multi-frame rate / multi-standard exports? No, they’re all locked in by the time it gets to me.
Or is everything one size/one frame rate? Again it’s all locked in by the time it gets to me.
Okay cool. So, my first thought its, welcome to the fecking club! I work exclusively in commercials and I feel the same way you do about the deliverables loads in commercials, and can’t imagine what its like to work on something longer than 30. I recently worked on a 1:43 (thats 1 minute, 43 seconds) and that was rough.
Next, the low hanging fruit here is artist behavior and pipeline choices. Of the 3 you mentioned feeling the same way, I’d get the whole team together asap to see why the 3 of you feel the way you do. Perhaps you just have the hard stuff. Perhaps you are just better than everyone else and get loaded up from production/scheduling. Perhaps you are just the kindest and the producers know that you won’t say no. It could be anything. Maybe the other artists don’t want to complain because they are single income/3 kids and are happy to have jobs. Who knows. It’s always complex.
Your ultimate challenge is one of motivation for management. Since you don’t get OT, they may not be necessarily motivated to have anybody else help out. If this was a large facility doing commercials, we’d have someone around that was motivated to take over my job and had access to a Mac and Workspacing in to a Shared Library via Flame Assist handling deliveries for a fraction of the cost. 6 Flames is kinda the sweet spot, at least in my limited and narrow experience, for some kind of apprentice/junior situation to help with deliveries. Is there an editorial dept in your ‘large’ facility that could perhaps spare some part-time talent?
Regardless of your particular staffing and organizational challenges, which, absolutely everybody with more than 0 employees has, you are ultimately going to be forced to…pardon my French…science the shit out of this.
Some Python generalizations to wetter your whistle. This may not be relevant to your situation, but just to get you thinking about where to streamline. Have saved export presets for everything you do. It’s worth the time. Save them with and without the “Using the Mark Ins and Outs” (omg 2 weeks off and I can’t remember what that button is called in the Export module…). Use tokens in the path to help cut down on any navigations you do. Your server does have consistent structures, right, with a top-level folder name the same as your flame project, right? Then tokens built into your export paths in the export presets with absolute and relative paths is a beautiful thing. For example… films/projects//exports/flame/<YYMMDD_HH_MM/<‘export_preset_name’>/your export. This with and without the Mark Ins is super powerful to quickly do these. Also, Stream Deck. If you can give it a hot key, you can program it into a Stream Deck.
Anyways, just a little food for thought.
Thank you for this Randy, sorry for not replying yesterday. Had a crazy busy day and started using 2021.2 for the first time, was not an enjoyable experience!
I think we’ll all have a chat and see what we can come up with. I wish some of our assistants wanted to take my seat, be great to have someone wanting to learn the kit and then push for a place in the team.
As for export presets I’ve got those sorted, I haven’t thought about doing them for folder locations though so I’ll look into that.
I think what will work best in our situation would be to push to have a dedicated assistant in this case, one who’s hours overlap ours. I’ll chat with the others and see what they think.