Camera and Lens Info Table?

I’ve been on too many Filemaker shows since the last time I used Shotgun and am having a difficult time remembering what’s what.

In my vague memory there was a way to create a table of all onset data so that if I linked a slate_take name to a shot it would fill in all the camera data from a constant table. For the life of me I can’t seem to figure out where this data would be imported or if I need to create all the fields and even in this case it would be tough to know what types of fields they would be. I’ve checked tutorials and user guides but it seems like I’m using the wrong keywords, everything keeps directing me to Version and Shot tracking which is much more straight forward. I’m sure I’m missing something easy. Help!

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We use the Slate Entity - import the file data, and then connect the slate to the version

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Hi, Jessica! Great to see you here :slight_smile:

There’s a bit of setup to start off with here but once you have it going, it should be easy to maintain. First off, make sure your Camera and Slate entity is enabled for your Shotgun site. An entity is just a database table, similar to tables in Filemaker. Camera should be by default but Slate may not be. If it’s not, go the the Admin Menu (click your profile picture in the upper right and you’ll see the section just below your account settings options). Click on Site Preferences, then find the Entities section and expand it. Look for the the entity you want to enable and select the radio button that says Yes, use Camera and save. One thing to note here is that the Camera and Slate entity are both project entities. That means that they only live per project, so you can have two cameras of the same name but connected to two different projects.

If you don’t have access to the Site Preferences, you’ll need to talk to your studio’s Shotgun Admin to get access.

Next, if you have a list of Camera data, you can navigate to a Camera entity page and start looking at what fields are currently visible. If you need to import more information (fields) then what is visible, you can create new ones. This doc will show you detailed information on what fields are and how to create them. I would hold off on linking the Slate record to the Camera record.

Set up Slate similarly - review what Slate data you have, then create fields you may need.

The last field to create here (and it doesn’t have to be the last one but for this example, I’m saving it for the end because it’s the only field I’m sure you’ll need to make) is the one that connects Cameras to Slate. I would assume a Slate only has one linked Camera, so I would create it as an entity type field linked from Slate to Camera. If you think you will have more multiple Cameras linked to a single Slate then you would choose a multi-entity type field. The downfall with using a multi-entity type is that it would be difficult to pull details of the Camera data in through the Shot -> Slate relationship.

Now your tables are set up so you can import your data in through our importer. This should give you an idea of how the importer works. If you are importing the Camera data first, you won’t be able to import the Slate at the same time because the record doesn’t exist yet. So, create Cameras and all their data first, then go to Slate and import all that information, linked to Camera.

Finally, you’ll want to link from Shot to Slate. Again, assuming it’s one Slate per Shot, you’ll want to make it an entity field, not a multi-entity field.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you need more detail!

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Hahah, oh hey Tram Le-Jones, facebook friend of mine and mother to the most adorable children in the world.

Thanks for answering my most basic of questions! I’m going to follow this advice today and let you know if I have any issues. Don’t tell any of our mutual friends that I had to get help :wink:

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Great tip… I think we should have more of this set up “out of the box” especially for slate info etc… + more tutorials related to pre production and production data in shotgun.
Here is a related question
How are people recording their shoot data in terms of recording elements such as clean plate / Greenscreen elements on the day of shoot… as Tasks. Related to assets or Elements? And linked to slates / camera info…? Ill post a question as a new thread.

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