Case case – Filmgate

Case Study

POST PRODUCTION – VFX PIPELINE

About

Filmgate (Gothenburg, Sweden), a post production company focusing on visual effects (VFX), has since the start in 2006 put Sweden on the map internationally when it comes to both high end work and their fine selection of independent film productions.

accsyn started beeing developed at Filmgate as the in-house file transfer & render tool back in 2015, driving the API-first approach to make it integrate into a VFX pipeline.

Problems that needed solving

Filmgate is a relatively small post house, punching way above their weight. To accomplish this, they realised they had to automate as much as possible, leaving the artist to what they do best – producing amazing shots.

The existing FTP deployment was a pain, requiring material to be manually copied to FTP, and pulled back, whenever external collaborators were involved. Adding to that the unstability and bad performance inherent of the FTP protocol.
As Filmgate had multiple remote offices, and employees working from home, the VFX pipeline had to be able to automate the push and pull of work material. It was nearly impossible with FTP and other MFT (Managed File Transfer) solutions were extremely expensive.
As rendering also spanned multiple offices, the render farm required to support scripted file transfers. With that comes automated backups of remote data, only sending the critical work files leaving caches and other temp data behind.
Production were heavily relying on outsourcing, collecting shots and their dependencies and copying to the FTP was daunting task. And the other way around, bringing the result back in to the pipeline from the FTP and doing Q/C & review was cumbersome.

Designing a VFX pipeline

Filmgate set out on a journey to build a streamlined production environment, that removed all the manual repetitive work from artists so they could focus on what they were hired to do.

They choose ftrack as the project management software, having full Python API support. This, together with building accsyn as an API first cloud SaaS solution, was a huge enabler.

Also, DCC:s like Maya, Nuke and Houdini, also have Python support, meaning that the VFX pipeline could assist the artists 100% independent of what they were doing.

How accsyn is used today

accsyn Workflows does all the heavy lifting when it comes to file transfers and renders, working 24/7 silently and reliable in the background.

The accsyn Desktop App is used by all employees for monitoring and prioritising transfers and renders – invaluable for staying on top when it comes to production planning and day-to-day coordination.

Here is the how a project is run through the pipeline and how accsyn plays it part:

The conform process runs on the accsyn farm, using Workflow render scripts, copying footage and elements to the publish location on work storage.
When shots are assigned to remote offices or artists, associated data are automatically pushed to remote storage. The same goes for outsourcing – a package is built on the farm and then dispatched using accsyn Delivery.
DCC plugins in Maya, Nuke and Houdini submits render jobs to the accsyn farm, utilising free capacity across multiple offices, taking care of the synk of dependencies by analysing the work files.
Remote vendors have access to selected areas of the project on storage through accsyn File Sharing, enabling them to fetch missing assets and resources outside business hours.
When a remote artist publish a shot, the result with workfile and dependencies are pulled back to main central storage. The same goes for remote vendors – they publish within the accsyn Desktop App with technical validation followed by a publish to ftrack on farm on arrival of material.

Summary

Today, Filmgate artists cannot live without the pipeline – streamlining production, cutting overtime and emergency callouts outside business hours.

Never again coordinators need to second guess if a shot has been properly conformed, outsourced, rendered, synced or delivered – the stable accsyn platform has proven stable throughout the production of 100’s of movies.

Showreel

Additional resources

Filmgate VFX

workflows

file sharing