This post covers pretty senior level work volunteered by some serious veterans in the industry - so with that in mind, I am adding to the project humbly with the perspective I've gained as a previous coordinator. I'm hoping to add that perspective here to help build a useful LLM assisted note-taking process.

What is 'DNA' so far?​

'DNA' stands for Dailies Notes Assistant. It's a new open-source project in early development by folks contributing at the Academy Software Foundation. The idea behind the project is to scope out the usefulness of integrating LLM transcriptions with the VFX note-taking process. A heavy emphasis on utility rather than novelty is at the center of the project — as well as a thoughtfulness about adding to rather than taking away from the work of production professionals.

This post is a review of Resilio Active Everywhere and their Slipstream features. This post also outlines a Resilio ShotGrid integration using a webhooks workflow. Here's the demo video and GitHub repository for that. This post is not sponsored.

Introduction​

For a couple years now, I've been wondering about the best setups for data distribution in Visual Effects. How do you get shots to clients? How do you make it easy for artists, working from a million different places, to access data and plates? In 2024, I wrote about a new company called Suite Studios, and recently in August, I revisited the subject, writing about the whole landscape for file streaming and data-distribution. At Baked Studios, I put together a workflow that incorporated file streaming, and it worked for the most part, but there was always some parameter, some feature that didn't work perfectly for us. It seemed impossible to find a platform that could tick every box.

It's September 2025 now, and I think I've found the workflow I was looking for.

This post is about creating guides in nuke for vendor-side VFX internal reviews. Full demo here and Git Repo with Script here

Introduction​

The VFX for Spike Lee's film Highest 2 Lowest were done in large part at Baked Studios in New York City. The film had a long list of camera formats used during shooting and each camera had its own crop factor from plate to what was in the edit. This presented us with a challenge to manage aspect ratios with letterboxing along with these overall crop factors programmatically from shot to shot.

Tcl (Pronounced "Tickle") is a scripting language that Nuke modifies to create an expression language specialized for compositing math. Nuke's Tcl expressions can be used to great effect for simple modifications to knob parameters via mathematical expressions with its syntax.

Baked Studios by the time I left, had a robust python based pipeline integrated with ShotGrid toolkit. Largely built by U.K company Nodes & Layers, this pipeline allowed us to pull data from ShotGrid into nuke for slates, burnins, and various Tcl expressions if needed. The details of this workflow are largely proprietary and out of the scope of this blog post, but I encourage people to reach out to both Baked Studios and Nodes & Layers for details and or services.

TLDR: This is about a storage clean-up tool and why your Gen-Z coordinators need to be using Nuke Assist.

Why Nuke Assist Actually Slaps​

Nuke Assist is a limited version of Nuke that comes packaged twice with each NukeX or Studio license. This extra version of the software is extremely useful in a large studio pipeline because it lets you break up work and licenses in a way that is efficient and cost effective. The limitations (no write nodes, limited comp nodes, gizmos etc...) are a feature and not a bug. You can use nuke --assist for paint, roto and tracking work, while breaking out final comp and render work for regular nuke. Similarly, certain coordinator tasks like ingesting, as well as some supervisor tasks like node tree hygiene checks, can also be done using nuke --assist. This article is going to focus on the coordinator's use-case and how Nuke Assist can help act as a connection layer between Autodesk ShotGrid and a filesystem. First, a little history.

This is a blog post about data-distribution in VFX. This post also touches on cloud vs on-prem, and how file-streaming adds new opportunities and challenges to the debate.

Why File Streaming?​

Ever since the pandemic, post-production houses of all sizes have been exploring the best ways to work remotely. Remote desktop emerged to bridge existing on-premise environments with this new world order. However, some began to wonder about the need for on-prem in the first place. Cloud workflows reemerged as a solution, and file-streaming services came onto the scene boasting the ability to work from anywhere. In the midst of the age-old fierce debate of cloud vs on-prem, file streaming entered the chat.

In order of usage frequency:

1. Cloudron ☁ - Opensource self-hosting made easy.
2. Tailscale 🛜 - Modern, cross-platform and FOSS VPN mesh tool.
3. Keyboard Maestro 🎻 - Neat tool for making macros on your mac.
4. Markdown Here Ⓜ️ - Markdown plugin for Thuderbird email client.
5. Rustdesk 🖥️ - Remote Desktop written in Rust.
6. Kiri Engine 🗿 - Incredible photogrametry and LiDAR scanning from your phone.
7. Comfy UI 🎨 - Interface for generating images with AI.
8. Invoice Ninja 🥷 - Snappy, well designed FOSS invoicing program.
9. Resilio Active Everywhere 📡 - Distributing data made easy, sync solution that packs a punch.
10. Advanced Renamer 📝 - Rename in batch with sequencing and other numerical features.

Command Line Tools

1. yazi 🗂️ - Terminal based file explorer written in rust.
2. tldr 📝 - Display simple help pages for command-line tools from the tldr-pages project.
3. fastfetch ℹ - Display information about your operating system, software and hardware.

Honorable mentions (🦃Turnkey🔑 platforms):

• Arch Platform Technologies 🏛️ - Intensely configurable cloud workstations designed for VFX.
• [Re]design Artst Anywhere 🌎 - Cloud solution for workstations with Flow PTR integrations.
• Studio Monkey 🐒 - Tools for managing productions.

This blog post outlines a way to revamp ShotGrid statuses for production with a webhooks server and careful planning.

Statuses 2.0​

In order to redesign your status workflow in ShotGrid, the first thing to understand is that any entity in ShotGrid can have a status. Shots, Versions, Tasks, in ShotGrid these are considered "entities" meaning they can hold a number of attributes or "fields", one of which is a status.

When working in live action VFX, statuses are typically used for your Shots. You can get more granular if you've incorporated a task workflow, i.e for what specifically needs to be done on a shot, and more granular further, for versions, which can be iterations of work done for a task on that shot.

Production Workflow Manager: A liaison who designs, manages, and optimizes production workflows and tool configurations, allowing for fluid collaboration between creative, production, and technical teams.

Introduction​

Most of us accept that the primary role of a VFX vendor-side production team is to facilitate the activities of artists working on a project. The tangible goal-posts then, can be summed up as: keeping an artist's main focus on what's happening between their read and write nodes — not tracking creative look approvals, change orders, linking assets, scheduling, relaying notes, and so on...

A good producer needs to have a set of tools at their disposal to enlist, support, and deliver the work of these artists. These tools should also help make sure producers and coordinators can utilize all available data tracked in whatever production resources available. Enter the Production Workflow Manager. Some put this under Production Manager, others Production Pipeline Lead, at some shops coordinators do this, or TDs, but this person's role is to facilitate the facilitators — and it's my opinion that this should be a dedicated role as the envoy to pipeline from production. Essentially someone who works to build, teach, and support workflows that bolster the work of production professionals.

This post outlines a workflow with Tailscale, a VPN tool, and Thinkbox Deadline for rendering.

The Genius of Meshes​

I recently stumbled upon a very cool FOSS tool called Tailscale. Tailscale is a secure and easy-to-use VPN that allows you to connect to a network remotely — like from an airplane or in my case, often from China.

Something specifically interesting about Tailscale is that it uses a mesh network topology, which means that every device on the network is connected to every other device. This allows for quick and reliable communication between devices, even if they are behind firewalls. On top of that, Tailscale gives you a pretty sweet user interface, making it easy to set up and authenticate with, certainly easier than opening up ports and forwarding stuff. Tailscale is built on top of WireGuard which is their cryptographic foundation for secure peer-to-peer connections. There's a bunch more that they do with smartly storing keys and how they exchange, but essentially, there's no single point of failure (or bottlenecking), and the scalability factor of this particular type of distributed mesh is huge too (but they let you select "exit nodes" where you can funnel traffic specifically if you still want stuff to go through a chosen node).

tldr: I made a Christmas card in Unreal Engine in 2023 that you can watch here on YouTube.

In December 2023, I was a relatively new addition to the team at Baked Studios and thought it might be nice to make everyone a Christmas card using Unreal Engine. I had been curious about the historic game engine and quickly rising DCC for some time. But when my favorite YouTuber covered it in a video, I had to give it a try.

Behind the Scenes​

Cookie Development in Maya​