At Mousetrappe we receive a lot of assets from clients. eps, psd, fbx, mov, pdf etc... A way to quickly publish / link those assets to SPT would be great. Something that would batch log the current file path or move the file to the proper shot structure. Make a thumbnail if it can. Allow for snapshots on unrecognized file types.
Cedar-
Hi Cedar!
This sounds super useful, and it's an idea that's been kicking around our heads for a while as well! This is part of the motivation behind the shell engine, which can enable various utilities to be called from the command line and/or standalone apps to be called that can do helpful things (as you describe). I have a few follow up questions for you on this though:
Our sense here is that there are a lot of different use cases, and it might make sense to get the ball rolling with specific utilities that are targeted to certain use cases, allowing people to use the right one for what they need. What do you think about this approach?
Ryan.
Hey Ryan,
I'll look at the command line tools again. Perhaps we can rig something up.
A version in screening room would be great however I imagine most media published this way to be large files. Stock footage, reference video, client animations etc.. These files would first need to be converted to something practical to upload. At that point it might be better to use something like Hiero to transcode then publish. This opens up another question on how best to create non project specific repositories
I think we can always assume the data will always be outside the file structure but not always moved into the file structure. Perhaps this is the difference between a link and publish. We are prompted to publish for use as production material or link for reference.
Looking forward to the release of an After Effects Engine, an illustrator file might be the starting point of work. That .ai file would not be recognized by SPT. It could not be converted to anything else. This might expose my limited understanding of SPT Templates.
I tool like this could be extremely useful. For us the most useful part is handing it to a PA with limited experience who can then help log incoming material.