Ftrack was originally developed as an in-house production tracking tool at Fido Film in 2008. When commercial development of the product began in 2011, it was already being used by a number of high-profile facilities including Cinesite, Filmmore and Compagnie Generale Des Effets Visuels.
The latest version of its out-of-the-box platform brings numerous updates including an entirely updated user interface, new planning and review tools, workflow updates and much more. ftrack allows users to easily track their production or project, manage assets, review shots, schedule workloads and assigned tasks and collaborate together in one easy-to-access portal.
“We’ve been a user of ftrack from early on and this version is a huge leap forward,” says Hans Van Helden, Managing Director at Filmmore. “I love the functionality it provides and everyone at our company finds it incredibly easy to use. ftrack has enabled us to easily manage multiple projects spread across our facilities locations and work effectively with remote artists.”
[from Press Release]
New additions include:
• An improved unified inbox that’s always visible in the top menu bar, helping users stay on top of notifications as they arrive in their inbox.
• A bespoke artists page that provides an overview of all projects and allows artists to claim tasks from the available queue.
• A notification engine that pushes updates to any browser or application and even allows native desktop notifications on an individual’s computer.
• A redesigned notes management system that allows users to drag and drop attachments, delete, edit or star important notes with ease.
• An improved team planner that incorporates drag and drop task boards. Users can assign tasks to artists with different skillsets and easily locate an artist with available bandwidth.
• Planning tools that give users the ability to block out projects and assign artists to phases instead of individual tasks.
• Task templates that let users create templates and apply them to individual projects, episodes, sequences and shots.
In addition, asset builds are now a separate entity in ftrack 2.0 and functionality has been added to let users link these to the shots. This automatically gives users access to versions from linked asset builds when working with shots.
Review functionality has been added to ftrack with the release of ftrackreview which allows customers to take advantage of tight integration with a number of industry standard review applications including The Foundry’s HIERO and HIEROPLAYER as well as Tweak Software’s RV.
The wider ftrack application also benefits from integration with The Foundry’s NUKE and Autodesk Maya.
The cloud service ftrackreview.com, which will allow cloud users to simply load up sequences and review in a browser, will be available later this year.