#vfxpipeline — Public Fediverse posts

IBM Aspera is a commercial and pricey file transfer service that is used a lot in the VFX industry.
Rocky Linux 9 is an operating system that is used a lot in the VFX industry.

IBM has retired their file transfer client and the new app no longer works on Rocky Linux 9. it requires release 10.

Rocky Linux 10 is not used in the VFX industry a lot yet because the major apps we use don’t support it yet (officially that is) and 9 isn‘t end of life yet by a long shot.

😩

#VFXPipeline #VFX

All requests that a VFX TD receives can be divided into 3 categories:

1. I'm too lazy to push a button. Can the push be automated?
2. I'm too much of a micro-manager to push 1 button. Can you please cram 5 buttons into this GUI for me?
3. Why is this a button? At my previous company they had a dropdown for this. It would run a database query over 200 tables before it would display the GUI and it was very slow but I think it was quite elegant for this particular corner case.

#VFXPipeline

My current task for our #VFXPipeline is to accomodate Windows users in a Linux pipeline. Easiest option: give every Photoshop artist a Linux workstation for Nuke. Seems to be a common thing. But out of curiosity (and to be prudent with hardware) I‘m trying to get everything working on Windows. A constant source of sadness I have to say, worse than UTF8 strings in Python 2.

Our #VFXPipeline, database and renderfarm also supports shot numbers with emojis. Need to find my post about this from a few years ago 😁
Maybe I should test it again to make sure it still works. Back then, all I had to do was disable a regular expression that enforced alphanumeric characters. https://mastodon.social/@Edent/116436067873523016

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116351915067362732

Important read in a light tone! This is what I also see when it comes to a #VFXPipeline: pumping out code is not the problem. And we're not solving hard stuff like writing our own render engine.
My job is to say "no" a lot ("no you won't get a button to skip sanity checks"). If I added a checkbox every time a coworker wanted one, our tools would have an unusable GUI.

I swear Prism is 90% of my frustration at work.
I can't believe how a simple design mistake is able to create so much instability while preventing any fix with wrappers.
What design mistake ?
- Prism set environment variables from the Python runtime by modifying `os.environ` .
- You may define different variables per project.
- You can switch project while in the same software session
This is an absolute nightmare to manage.
There's no ideal workaround.
#vfxPipeline

We haven't worked with DPX files for years, but the pipeline I built still supports them. I fear that once I remove all the `or ext == ".dpx"` parts in the code a client will pop up who doesn't use EXR files.

#VFXPipeline

Nuke bug of the day: Nuke's color pipeline breaks with completely nonsensical errors whenever you add the keyword "default_view_transform:" to your OCIO configuration. That's really weird because it doesn't really do anything color-related except define which value the viewer should be set to initially.

#Nuke #VFXPipeline #OpenColorIO

For #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm highlighting open-source tools in our #VFXpipeline. Today: #OpenColorIO

OCIO is a library that is part of all modern DCC applications. It color-manages images, that is: add or remove gamma corrections, apply LUTs (look-up tables) and so on in a well-defined way. Before OCIO for example, every application had to write their own formulas for sRGB or logarithmic curves and one program might load LUTs in format A but the other needed format B.

https://opencolorio.org

Had to debug a weird #Houdini color issue yesterday. Turns out that if you're using a custom #OCIO config file without file rules, Houdini will apply its own set. And as of Houdini 21 those are no longer "OpenEXR is scene linear". It seems to apply the file rules from its default ocio file which assigns "Linear Rec.709 (sRGB)" if it exists and only uses scene_linear if it doesn't. So if you add a space of that name, suddenly all existing scenes will look different than before 😱
#VFXPipeline

For #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'd like to post about open source tools that we're using in our #VFXPipeline.

On Dec. 5th let's start with #OpenImageIO (https://openimageio.readthedocs.io/en/stable/).

It's a C++ library and Python module for image processing. Unlike old projects (i.e. ImageMagick) it is aimed at modern VFX workflows (OpenEXR, speed).
We're just using its cli tool for reading and rewriting metadata, combining AOVs or creating thumbnails and text overlays.

And here's the other RV forum: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914114952/https://shotgunsoftware.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200682458-RV-Questions-and-Troubleshooting-Python-Mu-JavaScript-etc

I hope I got all subpages. Fortunately, the Internet Archive allows you to capture all related posts of each page but it didn't allow me to save every page after another. Instead, there's a (sensible) 1 hour timeout I needed to obey before I could crawl another page. There's probably a better tool for this, but I've only used their "save page now" form.

#VFXPipeline

It’s been [ 0 ] days since there was a hard to find bug because a piece of the #VFXpipeline assumed 24 fps while the project required 23.976 😩

#Nuke will apply OCIO color transforms to all EXR layers in its write node and that sucks. It makes the color transform knob useless whenever you want to output matte layers nowadays (because of scene-linear vs ap0).
Nuke even mangles mono-channel layers by treating them as a red channel and inventing blank green and blue channels to do gamut transforms with (it probably has a list of special channels where it doesn't do this like Zdepth but all my custom layers are mangled).

#VFXPipeline

It was only a matter of time until Amazon's free Deadline render manager got AWS cloud-only features: you can now only use flexible render licenses (paid per time used) when using render workers in their cloud 😡

That feature was really great. Instead of 1 Nuke render license for 400 bucks per year you could spend those 400 bucks to render your stuff on multiple machines over the weekend which is a much better use for $$$ when you're in crunch time.

https://marketplace.thinkboxsoftware.com/faq

#AWS #VFXpipeline

Behold! The #VFXpipeline ! https://pixelfed.social/p/pizzaparty/815457457051938447

I took another look at the progress of xSTUDIO, the media player and review application for #VFX. Seems like development is taking place not on their github but at internally at #DNEG. There is a development branch that got a few massive commits this year to sync it with their internal codebase.

Has anybody tried it yet or managed to compile it? It would be great to replace the Foundry's Hiero/Nuke Studio or the dog slow RV player...

https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/xstudio

#xstudio #ASWF #VFXpipeline

Buying another company‘s #VFXpipeline like you‘d buy a house:
„Why are there two faucets in the bedroom?“
„Legacy support for the 2019 version of our animation software“
„Ok, and why is the TV upside down?“
„Initially our whole CG team preferred to work upside down but they‘ve all left by now and the TV is the only part of the living room we haven’t refactored yet“

#VFXlife

You'll never make a producer unhappy by adding yet another status to the database.

"kokmsb" (this version is "Kinda OK but Maybe we'll get Something Better before 5pm")

"crvfm" (Client will ReView this during the next Full Moon)

#VFXpipeline

Introducing the new hire to the bespoke #VFXPipeline that I've built over the years...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA-_4P-aBPw

As a pipeline TD you've got to defend the KISS principle a lot.

artist: "I'd like a checkbox that lets me name a file final_final_v2".

producer: "The status report we need to submit to the client each week requires 5 additional status types...."

#VFXPipeline

Does everybody who’s running Linux in VFX shops know about cachefilesd? It’s a transparent cache for NFS file shares and it reduced the load on our fileserver by a lot. I‘ve added 1TB SSDs for /var/cache to our Houdini workstations and gone are the workarounds to cache geometry locally.
What’s the downside? cachefilesd seems to be quite old. It’s not deprecated, is it?

#LinuxAdmin #VFXpipeline

Finally I have the opportunity again to build a small new inhouse tool in #pyside. This time it’ll have drag&drop which is something I haven’t done with Qt before.
#VFXPipeline

Awesome overview of #OpenSource and Linux in the motion picture industry. Mostly #VFX of course.

It doesn’t mention #ffmpeg although I guess every studio is using it to encode into proprietary codecs.

I didn’t know the raw to ACES tool. We‘ve been using that „debayer“ script that builds the magic dcraw commandline.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/01/aswf_foss_oscars/

#VFXPipeline

Its OCIOColorspace node will only error on non-existing spaces if you try to render it so that can be caught. The OCIOLook node even has a graceful fallback feature ("shot | fallback" syntax). Houdini's OCIO node can apply colorspaces & roles but its available displays seem to be hard-coded to the ACES studio config instead of what's in your actual config (that's so weird that I need to double check if that is really the case).

my take: use colorspaces to apply a client's 3D LUT

#VFXPipeline

Today I started to build the #VFXpipeline for a show that needs to return quicktimes in 2 different resolutions, each using a different codec and each using a different crop of the full resolution EXRs.

#VFXLife

I wonder how many people thought they‘ll write their own render manager. „How hard can it be?“ and then bit off more than they could chew. #VFXPipeline