pipeline

“The pipeline handles the flow of the data as it travels through the stages of the production“

I worked on a good many productions where I either was part of the implementation process of the pipeline. Or I was responsible for the whole production and therefore had a leading role in the design and set-up of the pipeline and the production management.

• What is a Pipeline: There are various types of pipelines (e.g. for production, data or approval). Often people tend to think of pipelines as an integrated pipeline to control and manage the data and the work-flow.
  
  A pipeline is really about analyzing and describing processes and work-flows. They are not the program or script itself - they are the idea behind the program - and eventually become transformed into code eventually. These processes tend to vary a lot between studios as well as individual productions. And they are also different for VFX, CGI, S3D, Cel Animation and Stop Motion productions.
   
• Pipeline Generally: I design, plan and integrate pipelines and provide workflow and process definition as well as database creation and integration. This is either done on customers' in-house resources (programmer and code) or with the help of external tools and programmers. I also created pipeline workflows for CGI, VFX and stereoscopic productions.

• Milestone Pipeline A: The feature film “Jasper - Journey to the End of the World”: 2006 - 2008
  - Five companies, in three countries and six cities worked together
  - Pipeline was designed to host all data on a central "Alienbrain" server; all partners and branches used remote-synchronization
  - Data and task transfer was handled by pipeline tools and via our in-house developed database
  - Scripted pre-compositing set-up based on renderings
  - Pipeline was based on Maya and combustion

• Milestone Pipeline B: German TV-series "JoNaLu" (ZDF/kika): 2014 - 2015
  - High data quantity: 13 episodes (avg. 240 shots / ep.) a´ 25 min in 25fps and fulHD (approx. 4+ TB / ep.)
  - High amount of data transfer: external render farm; outsourcing; co-production partners
  - Data structure and pipeline was designed for automation and batch-processing
  - Scripted semi-automatic compositing set-up via presets
  - Pipeline was based on Maya and After-Effects

• Milestone Pipeline C: VFX Production "Augmented" (director Bjoern Gromoll): 2016
  - Multi application production: OS, Nuke, Maya and Houdini
  - UI based on PyQt/PySide and Python
  - Same custom publishing tool starts in all applications

• Database: Excel/Google–Doc, SQL, FileMaker and Shotgun (setup/customization)
• Scripting: Python, PyQt/PySide, MEL, SQL