Studio with remote workers

Very new to Shotgun, and trying to wrap my head around the possibilities for setting ourselves up correctly. Right now, we have freelancers scattered around all using dropbox. I’m wondering what the best path forward might be for unifying file paths to gain access to all the pipeline integrations of Shotgun. It seems impossible to do any sort of relative paths, and right now we all have it mapped to different places locally.

Any help on what others are doing in this situation is helpful! We’re not tied to dropbox, either. I’m assuming there are better solutions out there, I’m just not sure what they are at this point. How are scattered teams set up to share files and have Shotgun be able to access them?

5 Likes

Hi Maxwell

Welcome to the forums and great question!
So first off I would recommend checking out this thread, as it covers suggestions for working from home.

However dynamic or just different root locations are not something that we handle that well at the moment and is something we are interested in looking at.
There are things you can do to allow you to better work in this way but it would require some coding. For example this post that is linked to in the wfh topic, contains some example code to help you get started.

4 Likes

thanks for the reply! I probably could have worded it better, but I’m more wondering what the best options are in terms of how other people have set up their workflow with remote workers. We’re not tied to how it is currently, so I’m curious what options are out there that make working with shotgun, in this regard, more straightforward and streamlined across scattered teams.

2 Likes

Hi @Maxwell,

Still think you probably need to clarify a bit more what aspect of remote workflow you are trying to set up here. Is there any specific remote collaboration you get blocked?

With Shotgun as a cloud-based platform, remote workers can access your Shotgun site the same as they are in the studio. All the functionalities on Shotgun webapp should work the same while users switched to work remotely.

It’s the Shotgun toolkit configure you probably need to modify when switching from in-house production to remote one. You could refer to the dochere to see how to set up a distributed pipeline configure.

You have set up a centralized configure, you could follow the post below to turn from a centralized configure to a distributed one.

If you would like furthermore to share published files with a cloud storage, then Philip has mentioned the following post previously.

It’s all generic guide, and let us know what’s blocked on your side so that we could better direct you.

3 Likes

This is helpful, thank you! I think I’m finally more aware of what the issue at hand is(or at least what i don’t understand yet). It’s mainly in the realm of the handling of workfiles. From what I’ve gathered, as soon as you set up an advanced config, and allow shotgun to handle the project schema, you have to define one absolute path, the [primary] (per OS), and then everyone has to conform to that. And if not, they can’t access the tools?

We currently have scattered absolute paths (on different drives) all pointing to the same synced dropbox locally, so it seems like we would have to unify that across our team, but also require that of every remote worker. That wont work in a lot of situations, because its hard to assume that someone has a D drive, or has space on their C drive, etc. So, I was just wondering what alternative there might be in how we set things up in order to use an advanced config.

I also grant that I might be missing the bigger picture, here. I’m trying to consume all I can to understand our options.

1 Like

Regarding Dropbox. On Windows, we have been using a tool called Visual Subst, which is just making a permanent “mklink” command since the command doesn’t reestablish over a restart. Could probably do it just with a .bat file.

Anyway. I create a folder in Dropbox that I shared to everyone. I make that folder link to a consistent drive letter and tell every user to use the same letter for their machine.

Hope that helps.

6 Likes

Thanks so much! Just what i was looking for.