Virtual production pipeline management with Orca Studios and ftrack

Orca’s approach has proven popular with many productions, and the studio’s project load now resembles its service offering: broad and varied. “Given our range of services, our projects vary in both size and time-frames—sometimes we’ll have six smaller projects on at once; at other times, we’ll have four larger, more involved projects,” says Corsei. “Most recently we delivered 400 VFX shots in just four weeks for an international production, which was a fun challenge.”

Given the unpredictability of what might come into the studio next and the adaptive nature of Orca’s virtual production pipeline, the team requires a robust organizational tool to ensure everything reaches the finish line at the right time. Enter ftrack Studio.

“ftrack Studio is a crucial part of Orca’s success,” says Anca Bratu, Virtual Production Coordinator. “ftrack’s built-in planning, scheduling, and time-tracking, and its ability to predict the downtime of artists, helps us to maximize our capacity as a studio.”

ftrack Studio’s Overview tab, which details everything occurring on a single project, has proven particularly useful to Orca’s VFX producers. “Our producers use ftrack’s Overview tab to quickly skim through projects or view the entire studio schedule as a compiled view, all from one screen, which is a great way of working,” says Bratu. “They can also customize dashboards to show specific information about projects, which is hugely beneficial when clients or supervisors need to see a quick breakdown of that data.

“Another interesting thing we’ve done with ftrack Studio was to connect the software with the virtual production stage booking system, so there are no clashes when scheduling screen usage for different projects.”

Bratu and Orca’s producers also use ftrack Studio to track artist time, which helps when reporting on finished projects and bidding on new ones. “Features like this make work for Orca’s coordinators so much easier. They don’t need extra assistants to chase artists for information—ftrack Studio does that for them.”

ftrack Studio presents plenty of production tracking functionality out of the box, but the ftrack Python API also allows for bespoke customization if it’s needed. Orca Studios had some ideas and dived into the API, finding ways to fine-tune the software toward its unique, studio-specific workflows.

“The ability to customize ftrack Studio and align it with our pipeline has saved Orca Studios a ton of time,” says Bratu. “We have worked with the ftrack developers, who are super helpful, to create customized tools that sped up and automated many things our artists need to do, which was vital in saving us time and money. For example, using ftrack Studio, we can now easily ingest the Tracked Camera from our on-set tracking system into the pipeline for artists to use in Houdini, Maya, or Nuke.”

A customized login process has also helped Orca stay secure, which was a must in the era of remote workflows enforced by COVID-19.

“At Orca, we connect with a lot of people around the world to create and deliver our work,” says Bratu. “Currently, we’re working with artists in multiple time zones, including Spain, Los Angeles, and Russia. Many of our artists log in via our in-house virtual machine systems to connect with our on-set virtual production technicians in Barcelona or Madrid.

“This login process is made possible thanks to our customization of ftrack. Once logged in, data can flow from the virtual production stage straight to editorial, who edit the content and then publish it through our in-house systems and ftrack Studio. We can then track the extra work required from post-production.

“With multiple studios in various locations, effective collaboration can only come through a cloud-based infrastructure centralized on a local server. It really is essential to have a tool like ftrack making these things happen.”

Virtual production is not a trend or a fad; as Orca Studios continues to prove, it’s an important new step in filmmaking, enabling the creation of exciting new visuals in a fraction of the time offered by traditional, linear workflows.

For Bratu, real-time and virtual production are the future—adopting them just requires a different way of looking at things. “The production schedule on a virtual shoot puts part of the weight at the start of the chain—the work has to be accomplished upfront,” she says. “The main challenge is to educate the industry on how to make VFX choices earlier in production. From there, it’s all about staying on top of things as you would on any other production—and ftrack is the tool that makes that happen.”