Hey all,
I find it interesting how little talk there is about very important parts of the pipeline: storyboards, animatic and editing; and moreover how poorly it is handled by professional softwares.
I work in an (70+) animation studio in Finland as a Pipeline and Tools developer. We mostly do 2D animations here. While it’s easy to find resources, plugins, tools and guides how to do asset creation, handling and shot production in Maya, Nuke etc, I find it extremely difficult to find good workflows how to do pipelines for storyboards, animatics and editing process after shots are done.
Topic 1: What’s your pipeline to create storyboards and animatics?
We have only found two solutions on the market, that could create storyboards, Photoshop and Toonboom’s Storyboard Pro. We use the former, since latter crashes too much, is too slow for realtime previewing, and has tons of limitations to XML exporting and generally we don’t like how it stores the files. Also Storyboard Pro isn’t very extendable and forces you to have certain naming convention on panels. Photoshop is just more reliable, and it’s easier to script XML export to FCP, but making camera moves or simple keyframe animation would be much easier in SBP. After we’ve done with the panels initial round we do export the files to PNG’s, that animatic editor put to the timeline in FCP. Requesting new panels and modifying old ones is still bit of laborious. Editor has to keep track of those him/herself.
Our layout team want to have a PDF version (and printed one) from the final animatic and editor has done god knows what (transitions, multitrack layered and keyframed animation and whatnot) to create the final animatic. Ideally we could just read all the PNG’s ordered by time and all the shot relevant info like lengths from XML we get from animatic editor and output the result with python to nicely organized fashion and voila, get our storyboard. (Sometimes this doesn’t work and we just framegrab final animatic to sequential PNG’s and remove unnecessary panels by human selection). This of course doesn’t include any camera movement data. We did previously make the storyboard artists generate the PDF but unfortunately layouting that and changing constantly to match the animatic editor’s editing speed is very hard to do efficiently, so we dropped that out completely.
Also at the same time, we should somehow sync the latest animatic and changes to audio department, who are doing temp audio and clicktrack. Currently it involves a lot of manual moving and resyncing since editor has free hands to move stuff around endlessly. Is there any software that could compare two versions of XML so sound designer will see what has been changed between versions. We tried Conformalizer from Maggot software, but unfortunately it crashes everytime we try to load XML into it.
Also anybody had any luck with Premiere <=> FCP XML interchanging. I find out that 80% of time it doesn’t work and requires some manual changes to XML files to get it working. Premiere gives nice error messages like “Generic error -21”, that makes life easier. We try to migrate away from FCP to Premiere, but it’s slow process and for time being we have to keep FCP in the pipeline.
Premiere and FCP won’t support scripting so XML is basically the only option to move stuff around. Or have you guys written some import export plugins for both software to handle changes between software. Or maybe you are the lucky ones that can deal with one software in the pipeline.
Topic 2: How do you handle editing changes?
Of course animatic should be done so that there are not any changes to timing of the shots, but unfortunately directors change their mind sometimes.
The same problems are with actual cut after shots are animated. (Audio syncing etc). Editor will assemble the cut initially from autogenerated XML, but after that editor and director may request changes to shots, including prolonging, or changing shots. We do have 15 frames handles on both ends so that editor can have little freedom, but real problem are prolonged shots. We did solve this by having extra layer for "shot name"s, that we can parse from XML and see what are the new lengths and then prolong, or change the shot files accordingly. From the data we will output new tasks to Shotgun so that animators can do the necessary changes.
Once again, software to compare two XML’s would be nice. Or should we save some kind of metadata to shot’s so we can detect if editor has wanted to cut a shot into two separated shots and inserted some action inbetween. Currently the XML round feels stupid way to do this thing.
With film production we would have source material long enough to allow editing, but with animations, we want to animate only the minimum required. Each frame counts.
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I understand this might be wrong forum to discuss this, since a lot of discussion is centered around shot production, but if there are some Pipeline TD’s tackling with the same problems we are, would love to hear some thoughts. 
-Pauli