How’s your experience with Ftrack in your facility?
Is it easy to set up and customize to existing workflows?
How much effort is needed to get it up and running for different apps like Flame, Nuke, AE etc…?
We’re using NIM because it has working “out-of-the-box-style presets” to integrate and is easy to adapt for commercial workflows for smaller post houses.
But Dev became quite silent lately so we’re opening our eyes for another solution.
We tested Shotgun, but it feels more as a solution for feature and less for small term commercial projects.
We met with Andrew awhile back. He is a great guy, and spent hours with us. But NIM just didn’t fit our needs. We do feature work, and needed to have additional in-house pipeline that we could connect. Shotgun works great for that. The downside is that out of the box, SG has a terrible User Experience on the web end. The UI is horrible. The good news is that you can customize their UI nearly endlessly with a few clicks. The “Zero config” SG/Flame integration is great and does just about everything one would want. Unfortunately, the “zero config” capabilities with Nuke and maybe other apps is significantly lacking. You can choose to “take over” the configuration and turn it into “advanced config” but then you basically need a pipeline guy.
I am not familiar with the capabilities of F-Track or NIM with the other apps you mentioned. So the above may not be helpful to you.
Funny that you say that @ChrisKasten I have been feeling the same way.
We picked NiM out of the others for the way it handled not just the VFX breakdown and shot management but also the scheduling and production side of things.
Being a smaller post house without dedicated people to script and customise a pipeline we found NiM excellent and it helped us get our OpenClip and shot publish workflow off the ground. For that we are eternally grateful.
However the way NiM handles bidding/quote and scheduling needs some work and we have found ourselves wanting more. You are right that progress seems to have stalled. Andrew has been very helpful when I needed help. He chewed through some code for me when I needed to customise some Python but our production has been struggling and it isn’t quite the integrated system that we want.
I have had no experience with Ftrack and although my experience with ShotGun makes me think that it is overkill the Logik live #22 was very interesting and looks like it can be made to work the way you want it to fairly easily.
Looking into ShotGun at the moment. I know that ShotGun won’t handle our scheduling and we are looking into options for that to accompany it.
I’ve been asking the guys at Ftrack what is going on with Flame integration, and it’s on their to do list, but no ETA at the moment.
We have used NIM in the past and it’s great but depends on what data you need out of it (if it fits the pre-defined structure) and it’s also good at creating the folder schemas on the server … We still actually use this for bidding as it helps to track costs and produce bidding docs for clients.
Regarding Shotgun… we have used this for a year and have tested both zero config and custom config (with distributed config uploaded to shotgun pipeline configuration) . The custom config is also a lot of work to get running and to maintain so you need someone on hand in case anything breaks… but in our experience having the remote Nuke workstations able to replicate project schemas via the uploaded config was a big plus. We have ongoing support requests between Flame and Shotgun support as we work on episodic / shot based projects rather than sequences (even though these contain sequences) It depends what kind of workflow / projects you have as to whether this works for you.
Alan’s Logik Shotgun session was great and revealed that you need to have some level of customisation to get around “campaigns” and folder structures …
Do let us know if you find a great solution…
PS There are some pipeline / support guys out there that deal with Shotgun integration etc. I had a chat with Re-design group recently
I’m also trying to get another publicly accessible link to Ftrack Flame integration requests… I’ll keep you posted
ALSO if you go down the FTRACK route, these guys look interesting https://pype.club/
we run ftrack because it used to be our inhouse solution, I do like it but we heavily customized it and it doesnt work with flame yet as craig said… shouldnt be too hard to do though with the ftrack api and python in flame. , I found a bit easier to work with than shotgut but I wouldnt say there is much between them.
They bought cinesync so they now have synced reviews inside ftrack which is VERY amazing.
Hi, a while ago i got a ftrack plugin for flame that was given as is… no documentation and no support. I never had time to test it and see what worked and what did not. It was called ftrack connect flame or something similar. I think it was an old project they have abandoned due to lack of interest. Did anyone on the forum had the opportunity to try it?
Announcing NIM 5.0, a massive update that helps #postproduction houses win business, track projects and manage remote and in-house artists – all in one place.
At the mill, Ftrack is really not well integrated at all. It’s been 7 years and counting. I’ve given up believing it’s even possible. To me it feels like the Windows version of Mac OS.
We’re looking forward to the update but I hope they’ve worked on task/shot tracking. Maybe it’s just me but I find it difficult to see when a given task is completed so the next task can begin and seeing what version is associated with it. That said we haven’t fully committed to that aspect of the software yet so perhaps it’s user error or just not knowing where to look. Personally I found Shotgun to better in that regard.
Anyone considering using Shotgrid, you should check out this thread from their forum. Support has basically disappeared. Many many users including myself reporting ZERO response on multiple tickets. ADSK ruins another software again.
We are happy NIM customer, can’t recommend it enough and although it is true that needs polishing on some areas, improving others, etc… it is clear they are moving forward fast and NIM 6 is a major upgrade for production so we are VERY happy.
Of course we also want better scheduling, calendars, reporting and the off-the-shelf NIM connectors need a lot of work to behave as you will probably want, in particular with the publishing part but the API is very good so we rebuilt them and works great.
