Working from Home: What Technical Challenges Are you Facing or Concerned About?

We’ve been hearing that many studio admins are concerned about how to setup as you push towards remote working. While it’s not necessarily Shotgun related, we want to help support those conversations and connect you to one another. :woman_technologist: :man_technologist:

Have you found a solution that worked for your studio? Are you trying to figure out the best way to set up for your studio but want to bounce some ideas off others? Post below! Let’s hear what’s on your mind :brain:

If you’re interested in some best practices for actually getting work done while you’re home, check out our other thread Working from Home: How Do You Do It?

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Hello Tram,

Thank you for opening this thread. This is actually something I’m looking into right now. I haven’t done much research yet, so please excuse if it’s already available somewhere in the documentation.

I’m right now facing the challenge of facilitating remote file transfer. We are operating in a Windows environment and our artists directly read from and write to our central server. Now I want to change it so that whenever an artist opens or saves a work file, this file is copied from or to the remote server, and loaded from a local cache. Obviously the same would be necessary for published files.

I have a full design in my head, but I was wondering the following to cut some corners:

  • Are there any hooks in the Shotgun Toolkit for integrating a file transfer solution?
  • Can anyone recommend a open-source or commercial solution for initiating and monitoring file transfer jobs?

Any additional information on this topic is greatly appreciated. I will make sure to share my findings as well.

Thank you
Christian

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I’m starting to evaluate Resilio Connect (https://www.resilio.com/connect/) for handling the file transfer.

Does anyone have experience with this solution? Are there any recommendations for alternatives?

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Total self promotion, but us at Arch (archpt.io) have been helping our clients work remotely for a while now, if you are at a studio and are looking to pivot into the cloud to help people WFH we may be able to help.

We’re fairly early stage and just coming out of stealth now-ish but have several clients already, Netflix, Solstice Studios & TrackVFX to name a few.

Even if you aren’t interested in our product but just want to chat about AWS Cloud feel free to reach out and we can just hang out and nerd out about the cloud!

Thanks
-Alex

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As far as tech resource go, here’s a neat doc by the VES with resources, tips and best practices for setting up facilities:

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Hi everyone,

We now have a slowly growing list of posts that provides suggestions on how to set up a working pipeline from home.

See it here.

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Wanted to share @doc 's pointer from another thread:

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Thanks for opening the thread! Great stuff. I appreciate you guys pushing towards being as helpful as possible for the community.

One issue we are experiencing is the ability to have users login to our studios tools. Our tools happen to be browser based, so we require users login using their shotgun credentials, However we have the two-factor-authentication enabled. I’ve been really struggling to figure out how to get this working using Javascript. The docs have no mention of how to do this. I’ve filled the python api with print statements to see how they were doing it but have come up short. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Here was my original post Two Factor Auth error using REST API

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Hi everyone. With an ever increasing number of people working from home and using Shotgun to do so, I wanted to reach out quickly and see if there’s anything we could be doing better to reduce the friction in these difficult times. Shotgun has always been intended to help people work remotely, but working remotely and working from home aren’t necessarily the same thing.

With software as flexible as Shotgun, there aren’t always changes that can be made in a timely manner that can solve all of the problems in a rapidly changing environment, but we’re looking to see if there are some quick wins here of things we might be able to improve in the product that we can implement rapidly enough for them to have a positive impact on your day to day in this situation.

I know some of you may have been providing feedback of this nature already, and we’re looking at that and seeing what we can do, but if you haven’t, and you’re having to use Shotgun from home and can see things that we could be doing better in this regard, please reply to this topic.

Thanks and stay safe and healthy all.

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Just a quick follow-up. We’ve heard from some of our clients that what would be helpful is to be able to block the obvious means of downloads for specific users. If this is of interest to you and you would like to provide feedback, please do so here: https://portal.productboard.com/9yfnzm5dxd3vzwducxczpphv/c/95-prevent-certain-users-from-downloading-files-from-shotgun

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Hi @jack,

A year ago or so, I tried it by not allowing to view the field sg_uploaded_movie to some permission groups, but the side effect of this was that neither they were able to see the Version using the overlay player.

A week ago I tied it again, and now it works without preventing them from playing the Versions using the overlay player or Shotgun Review, and the View source file… menu option is gone as you can see on the attached image.

Screenshot 2020-04-07 at 7.22.59 PM

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Thanks for the info! Glad this works for you as a good workaround. We’re in the process of making more of an official way to do this, but still allows artists to be able to upload media as well. Hopefully we’ll have something soon…

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Yes, we also noticed that the side effect was that now the artists are not allowed to upload Versions manually :frowning:
Thanks @jack

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Hey all—Autodesk is looking for feedback about how COVID-19 has impacted your work and the challenges you face. You’ll find details here:

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