Hello Logik Friends!
I’ve had some requests for a Logik Live that shows off project management: Things like ShotGrid/Flow, NIM, FTrack, etc. I’m just as interested in the home-grown solutions that people have come up with, especially freelancers who work for themselves or in small groups. Do you use Google Sheets? An open-source app? Please describe what you use here, and if you’re up for coming on Logik Live please let me know!
For single person jobs I’ll make a checklist using the mac Notes app and set it to float above the screen so I can remember what to do and check off each task as they’re done.
If you’d like to see an in-flame checklist (a small, silly, but very useful feature), please vote for it here.
Larger jobs it’s usually a google doc, and for big shops it’s some form of shot-tracker software.
For internal communications, we use Slack. For all else, we rely on the agency/client to provide deliverables spread sheets and scope-of-work trackers. That can come in the form of frame.io, google sheets, pdfs, Office docs, etc. I prefer the google sheets because they can update them without sending out new ones (because they often don’t send out new ones). Obviously that’s not adequate for big jobs but it works fine for spots.
As for something in-flame, I prefer to keep the tracking separate. I find it far less intrusive to be able to just glance down at my laptop.
I like that suggestion about having it float above the screen!
I remember some smart person writing a script that took the frame.io notes and brought them into Flame as timeline markers 
Combination of
frame io
google sheets
Asana
Would be really cool to see a logik live on this. It pops up every once in awhile where you need to help production out in tracking the job, particularly the jobs where you need to scale up with fellow flame artists and vendors etc., and the pipeline isn’t really in place to organize all that. Would specifically be interested to see if anyone’s using shotgrid/flow to track shots, and a cloud storage like lucid link to both publish plates and then finished comps out of batch from a remote artist. And at the end of the job archiving unmanaged.
Is anyone using @MikeV 's shot sheet maker or some use of the poster frames you can make when you publish?
We used it briefly and it was pretty neat.
@PlaceYourBetts - @MikeV is a legend!
Yes, just used this to track my last job. x3 30s commercials with very quick turn around schedule. Used the Shot Sheer Maker to export a spreadsheet of thumbnails, shot names, frame ranges etc, uploaded it to google sheets, and then added additional columns and drop downs for artist allocation, client notes etc. Producer had access to keep updated, and allowed artists to see notes, shot allocations etc. Was very handy as a starting point.
Airtable. It’s like Google Sheets or Excel on steroids.
Looking into a combo of FTrack & AYON but we may look into integrating Airtable with AYON as an option.
I ( small team) often use dropbox Replay. Make notes there (draw/ write), tag the people that should pick up that note and can easily follow what has been ‘completed.’ I’ve been looking at Kitsu also, installed it on a raspberrypi to play around with it, but as the composition of ‘my team (of freelancers)’ changes often the ‘onboarding’ time it takes kinda nullifies it’s gains… so for now I stick with Replay…
How good does Dropbox Replay work for that? I find uploads to Dropbox slow and the app overall pretty annoying.
In Frame IO you can tag team members, mark comments as complete (for tracking), and change overall status of an asset (needs review/approved/etc.). You have the ability to markup areas in the frame.
If you have a team account, you can leave team only comments that the client cannot see. Which is useful if you supervise some work and leave notes for the editor, but don’t want to make a separate upload for the client to review.
Frame IO upload speed is good, availability decent, and you also have the transfer app. And there are integrations with most post apps now.
I don’t notice the upload speed as my ‘jobs/ project’ folder is synced in the background to dropbox… so by the time I need to up the version it’s already there. FrameIO has more features for sure. But for my use case this works…
we work with ftrack and via our pipeline the time starts automatically as soon as the shot is opened or closed.
Used Kitsu a while ago to work on a team of three artists + client. Tracked few tasks on 170 shots including layout, lighting, fx and comp. Really helped organize and give feedback. Since then I use it for personal and side jobs.
I wrote some tools to interact with Kitsu pulling shot metadata to be use in Resolve, Nuke, Gaffer, Blender, 3DEqualizer and Command-Line… mainly for naming convention and filesystem interaction. The Resolve tools are a bit more involved as I use it to do VFX pulls an create Kitsu shot data. These are on github:
Lately I have been testing AYON for asset management but it is a bit overkill for personal work, so haven’t had the need to deep dive.
Not really Flame centric… but hey.
Where I am we’ve entertained a number of solutions. Looked at NIM and a lot of others. Worked with Ftrack briefly. Then went to Click-up and now we’re onto Airtable. A lot of this is producer centric as opposed to artist centric. But it allows our producers to build out task lists and project updates each day for each project for everyone (clients, artists, other stake holders)
Producers…
Can’t live with 'em…
Can’t replace 'em with task mangement software that’s integrated with flame… oh wait… maybe… just maybe…
That said, new production tracking functionality is starting to look interesting:
I have taken a look too and it is getting close for production tracking too.