At the beginning of (and, in fact, throughout) a big show I like to play around with different scheduling options and scenarios, based on different crew availability, different turnover dates and so on. In MS Project, this is easy - I can just save out a version of the current master schedule and mess around with it to my heart's content, and then keep it for reference - but I can't see an easy way to do this in Shotgun. I suppose one could create a duplicate of the entire Project and use that as a testbed, but that would mean an entire duplicate project for every alternative scenario if they were intended to be a permanent archive/resource for discussion. Would it be possible to create a 'schedule sandbox' in which one could create a snapshot of the current list of tasks, shots, assets and assignments and then have a space in which to mess around with them without the information immediately rolling out to every user? It would also be great if sandbox snapshots could be saved for later reference. I suppose an alternative would be to export a task list to .csv, and then use a separate Gantt editor with which to play around, but if there were a way to keep it all within Shotgun, that would be terrific.
7 comments
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Kate Phillips Further to this, if anything like this proves to be implementable it would be useful, within the sandbox space only, to be able to add notional new users to represent potential new crew without them adding to the total chargeable user base for the month.
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Don Parker Hi Kate, we've been thinking about this one for a while now and agree we need to implement some way for you to play with scenarios. We're not sure exactly how we're going to do this, but it's on our list (our first thought was an option to have many versions of the schedule, with one "official" version -- then control who can see each version through permissions).
As for the "potential crew", you can actually do that now. Make as many accounts as you like (Animator 1, Animator 2, Animator 3, etc.) and just set their status to "inactive". You are not charged for those accounts, but they can be used for temp scheduling purposes. You can see how the user account statuses work here: https://shotgunsoftware.zendesk.com/forums/32075/entries/59658 -
Kate Phillips Oh, that sounds great. I like the idea of having multiple versions of the schedule and being able to make one version the active one. Within that, it would be really useful if besides just rolling out task assignments to artists on only the active schedule, shots and sequences could also be controlled that way - so a number of shots and assigned tasks could be loaded on and used for planning schedules, but would then only display in the Project Shots page when they were marked as being part of the active schedule after the client has actually turned them over. At the moment I can do this by setting a Turned Over/Not Turned Over status for the shot and filtering for it but it relies on a view-by-view set of filters. It would be useful to have a 'one button' solution for it.
And thanks for the pointer towards the user account statuses - that's really helpful!
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Don Parker I've also been thinking it would be cool to turn on/off multiple schedules at once, like multiple google calendars. Then you can see how they line up, and maybe the ap can highlight the differences (or auto-update one schedule in places to match another?). Will keep pondering...
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Richard Thwaites Hey guys,
Jumping on the bandwagon here with my own version / interpretation of Kates ticket:
Scheduling Snap Shots and Scenario Planning
When starting out the planning phase of a project it is common for people to build different scenarios based on a master plan.
It would be fantastic if shotGun allowed you to lock a snapshot of a master schedule but then also allowed you to have different schedule pages "offline" or unconnected to the master (but based on the master schedule) that let you play with scenarios and different possibilities. These unconnected schedule pages should have strict permissions that only allow limited people visibility of the page.
If at any point an unconnected scenario becomes a reality then you should be able to promote it to the master.
The only way I can think of doing this currently is by having a master shotGun project and then some other shotGun planning projects which are not "official"/ visible to all crew.
My envisaged workflow would be:
Under the master shotGun project, go to your "master schedule" page, say something like *snap shot*, and that creates a new page called "master schedule *dated*". You then play around on "master schedule *dated*" to your hearts content, but nothing is changing on the original "master schedule" - then when you're ready you *promote* "master schedule *dated*" to the official page.
This would need to be handled carefully maybe with a step by step approval of all changes?
I think this would be a great way to handle scheduling in shotGun that would have minimal confusion for the crew who could possibly see their tasks change 10times a day as you try to find a good balance based on show requirements.
Many thanks,
Richard -
Sean McAlear Also jumping on the bandwagon for this request. has there been any updates or momentum towards creating a schedule sandbox, or offline mode recently? This is something we surely would use quite frequently.
Thanks,
-sean
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Ben Hadden Hi Sean, we haven't jumped into development on this project yet, but we have been speaking with a lot of studios about what's needed. If you (or anyone on this list) would be interested in speaking about what you need here, shoot me an email at benhadden@shotgunsoftware.com and I'll reach out when we're ready to chat. We know how valuable this would be, so we doing lots of research to see what a v1 could be.