Before getting into project specifics, it’s essential to establish a shared vision with your team regarding what you want to achieve when it comes to managing your projects with ftrack. This will inform how you use ftrack Studio and provide guidance on what information should be stored and updated in the workspace.
Remember that you do not have to check each box to be a “successful” ftrack user. The below is for guidance and inspiration around your implementation of ftrack only. Ultimately, how you use the platform is up to you.
Planning
Planning resources and capacity is not included in this Getting Started series but more can be learned in our "Using ftrack Studio" documentation.
☐ Plan your projects with events and milestones.
☐ Track holidays and vacations and understand the availability of your team.
☐ Allocate team members to projects based on User capacity.
☐ Use the Capacity Forecast to understand the available capacity of your team vs. what you have planned for.
Production tracking
☐ Add projects and break them down into tasks you can assign to your team.
☐ Create and/or update your projects from information held in external spreadsheets.
☐ Ask your creatives to log time against their tasks.
☐ Use bid estimates to see if they align with the tasks' actual logged completion time.
☐ Track progress toward your project’s completion with Gantt and Dashboards.
☐ Set statuses on tasks and track progress to ensure you hit your goals and deliver on time.
Asset management and automation
These topics are not included in this Getting Started series, but it is possible to learn more about within ftrack's other documentation.
☐ Use ftrack to orchestrate and track assets on your digital asset management (DAM) system, whether a simple NAS on your network or a more sophisticated solution. (This is accomplished with something we call storage locations.)
☐ Publish digital assets directly to storage from an application integrated with ftrack: Adobe Creative Suite, 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Nuke Studio, Hiero, Cinema 4D, Unreal Engine, Unity, Deadline, and more.
☐ Use the Connect desktop service to launch applications in the correct environment with ftrack integrations available.
☐ Leverage the Connect standalone publishers for scenarios where ftrack does not natively integrate with an application in use, or build your own integration.
☐ Automate tedious tasks, like moving files or assembling reports with the ftrack Actions system and API.
Reviews and approvals
☐ Review and approve work completed by your team.
☐ Use ftrack as your main solution for tracking feedback.
☐ Share your Asset Versions with external clients for feedback.
Take Action
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Take a moment to evaluate what your Project goals are. Collaborating with your Workspace team, discuss what goals you want to accomplish for your ftrack launch and what, if any, can be incorporated later to ease the process. It can be helpful to write them down so you can come back to them as a guide while you build your project structure. |