I have created a set of tools for different tasks we often do during our work days, most of these tools are python scripts and shell scripts (you can use them as a command line), but I created UI for all of them (in wxPython or directly embedded in Konqueror, a linux file browser).
(You can have a look the list at the end of this post.)
These tools are a help to work on projects, and are adapted to VFX projects needs :
- Publish Clip / Scene / Scripts : A "publication" tool, adapted to this specific project structure. It copies, or "share" users file(s)s to one of the "public folders" (considering the type of file and it's location, maya scenes, image sequences, nuke scripts, etc...), store this action in a database and send emails to the people previously set to receive this information.
- Consolidate Clip : A clip is a small group of folders. I created "clips" to deal easier with image sequences and relative movies, proxies and thumbnails. This give us one entity to deal with, as opposed to sequences, movies, mixed up in folders.
Consolidating Clip is a tool to create movie, proxy sequence and thumbnail from an image sequence (renders, comps, footage, etc...) all in one click.
This way work folders can stay clean and readable, movies and proxies are all created the same way (formats, compressions, etc...) and users don't lose time with boring tasks... :)
- mkClip (create a new clip, in konqueror) : Creates a new empty clip at the location.
- view clip Sequence / Movie / Proxy / Thumbnail : Open a specific viewer to view the selected Clip (considering what is to be viewed, it could be shake viewer, djv_view, etc...)
- check clip sequence : Runs a test on each image of a sequence and display a report. (this is useful when we have to deal with CG image sequences). The report format is the same used to our "render job manager" to make it easy to submit the missing or bad frames to the render farm.