Using the ShotGrid website

• ShotGrid - Website - Creating scenes and shots
• ShotGrid - Website - Creating a planning
• ShotGrid - Website - Making notes
• ShotGrid - Website - Creating a playlist
• ShotGrid - Website - Making a client review link

ShotGrid - Website - Creating scenes and shots

Created projects show up on nfa.shotgunstudio.com. Clicking on a project takes you to that project's main page. From there you can click on Shots to go to the shots page.

Creating a new shot can be done by clicking the blue Add Shot button. A new form will appear which you can fill in. This is the form where you can create a new scene as well if it doesn't yet exist:

You should fill in the Shot Name, Sequence, Task Template and FPS fields. The template option is extra important, as it decides which tasks are added to the shots. Select 2D shot if the shot only needs comp work and select 3D shot if the shot also needs CG. The rest you can leave blank as it's filled in automatically when you ingest footage through Hiero. You can now click Create Shot!

ShotGrid - Website - Creating a planning

Planning is one of the most import parts of creating great VFX. ShotGrid has some extensive tools for creating an artist planning, so here's how you should use them.

Step 1: Add people to your project

First you should add all the needed people to the project. Go to the People page, click on More and click on Link People to this Project. The big blue Add Person button won't work, as that opens the form that creates a new ShotGrid user. Yes that's stupid, no I don't know why they made it like that.

Select the users you want to add and press Link Selected.

Step 2: Create the shot planning

Click on a shot in the Shots page. You will be greeted with this page:

As you can see, every step in the VFX process has its own task with corresponding start and due dates and an assigned person. Setting these fields is essentially all you have to do to create your planning. Set the status to In Progress if people should be working on it, otherwise it won't show up in the ShotGrid file browser.

You can see the full planning if you go to the Shots page and click on Task view on the right hand side. This shows a great overview. You can of course tweak all the sorting options and the fields that are displayed by using the options next to the Add Task button.

ShotGrid - Website - Making notes

Supervisors of course need to give feedback on artist work. All this feedback should be done through ShotGrid so it's easy for people to find the right notes for the right shots. There are a couple of ways to make notes in ShotGrid.

#1: On a version

When you click on a published version you're taken to a video player. On the right side you'll find a panel where you can submit notes. You annotate the video with the tools on the top left. A screenshot with the annotations will then be attached to your note.

#2: Through RV

If you're doing a review session in our viewing room you can also write notes in RV. It's pretty much exactly the same as through the website:

#3: On the shot activity tab

Kinda speaks for itself honestly, just type something and hit Submit.

 

ShotGrid - Website - Creating a playlist

Playlists are a handy way of grouping together versions (the preview videos in ShotGrid) so you can easily review them. To get started, go over to the Review tab on your ShotGrid project page.

There you can create a playlist by clicking on the Add Playlist button. Fill in a descriptive name and click on Create Playlist.

 

To add a version to your playlist you should play the Link Versions button.

The Add Version button is used to create a new version, not to add an existing version to the playlist. The name is very confusing.

A small menu will pop up, click on the blue advanced text. A new window will appear:

This is where you actually need to select the versions that you want to add to the playlist. It might be useful to click on the Date Created column so newer versions show up first. Select the version you want to add and click on Link Selected. This will add the versions to the playlist. 

ShotGrid - Website - Making a client review link

ShotGrid has a system for sending playlists to people who don't have a ShotGrid account, which is perfect for sharing our work with directors or producers. Do to so, press the Share via Client Review Site button which you can find once you've selected a Playlist in the Media tab:

This will take you to a new page. You can invite people using the button on the top right corner. If there's no client user yet you'll need to press the create button:

Just fill in the information in the form and the client will receive an email! There's some additional settings you can fill in. It's handy to disable the password authentication as people tend to forget these things: