Hi,
Just wondering if project sharing is a feature the development team is considering for the next iteration of SB Pro.
-Johnny
Hi Lilly,
Thinking more of something along the lines of having multiple users access the same project residing on a central in-house server.
Maybe a SB Pro server side hosting software would be needed to do it correctly to ensure data integrity and performance from working over the network. A good example would be Filemaker Pro Server, it can host multiple FMPro databases and maximize performance for over the network. Using this method, you could probably even develop a version feature to keep different versions of the same project.
Maybe a more cruder method would be to rework how SB Pro locks the project. Possibly do it in a modular approach locking only the scene/panel actively being modified. Other users can still access and modify other scenes/panels in the project which aren’t locked and do it in the same fashion. This is kind of derived from the ‘deleting .sboard.lock’ workaround but obviously with changes in coding/optimization and becoming an ‘official’ feature and ensuring stability/data integrity.
Our current workflow is as you suggested, splitting up projects for different users then merging them back together. Great for large sequential sequences needing revisions, downside is the overhead/admin time required to split/merge and track the projects. It’s easy to manage on a small scale but becomes very time consuming and sometimes confusing/hectic on a larger scale.
When we only had 6 boards in the pipeline, it was fine to manage. Once we hit 12 boards (some in animatic stage) and they were all going through revisions, it became very hectic and time consuming to manage. We had to add in additional procedures to manage it all - meaning, more people/resources getting involved. This is to keep the 3 directors and 3 revisionists all working, jumping back and forth working on 12 boards with a constant stream of notes coming in.
In some situations, we’ll just give out the entire project to artists working on the board without splitting them up. They do their revision work and we conform them to the ‘master’ copy later. This is where opening the second copy of SB Pro using the alias workaround really comes in handy. We just drag the scene/panel from the revised projects into our master.
-Johnny
Well right now the way that we do things is we have the ability to split the project, then individuals can work on those scenes and then merge the project back together again. So in this way the project can be shared.
Did you have in mind something different?
~Lilly
Thanks for giving me this level of detail, Johnny. I’ll bring this to the team for discussion!
~Lilly