I am looking for any general advice around managing timecode through our pipeline.
We are a game studio but we have numerous cines that we need to sync the various elements with using timecode.
I am not that familiar with cinematic workflows or pipelines - my background is more rigging and asset pipeline - so I would really appreciate any pointers on managing timecode across the pipeline.
Our the data flow is:
- mocap is captured with timecode by a 3rd party vendor
- the data passes into Maya/Mobu for cleanup and then into unreal where it is added a sequence.
I want to know how we can ensure synchronisation across all environments using timecode.
I can see that Ayon extracts timecode with OTIO for shots and clips but how can we effectively import our timecode from our mocap shoots?
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Usually in VFX/Animation pipelines you don’t really work most of the time with timecode as is (I mean that SMPTE timecode). You deal with it in ingest and on delivery but not during the middle part of the production. Thats where you convert everything to frame numbers, fps, handles and clip in/outs. Some productions like to work from frame 1, some from frame 1001 (to avoid negative frames if you need to extend/deal with handles). The same goes for timecode - for TV production (and others) you usually start from 10:00:00.00 but you get pre-roll there etc. Stuff is much more complicated when you need to deal with drop frames and fields - working with frames somewhat simplifies things to artist.
So the usual method is to work in “shot relative frame number” (starting from 1001) mapped to source clip with clip in/out and then have timeline to deal with relations between clips and that is where you’ll have your timecode.
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Thank you for the reply @antirotor, it has helped me get my head around the subject a bit more - for Ayon specifically, how does timecode factor. I see there are a number of OTIO plugins - but only for editing software, are there plans to expand this into the Unreal integration as it is also used for editing?
Unreal unfortunately doesn’t support OTIO… yet. Since OTIO is binary dependency, we would need to ship it for all possible combinations of Python. There is a way to run OTIO in AYON process and that’s what we started to investigate and we started on prototype but this was halted due to the lack of funding. But yes - I think the overall goal is to use OTIO as much as possible even in hosts not directly used for editorial - but review. Imagine upcoming lists on AYON generating playlists as OTIO timelines to be viewed in OpenRV