Kenneth Bonde turned me on to this fxguide podcast episode in which Chris Sage of Luma Pictures talks about their work, their facility pipeline, and their job management tools.

FxGuide:Luma Pictures

This was interesting. They seem to have both a very high degree of integration with the rest of their tools, and very granular data. The integration is driven to the point where they are actually driving their custom render shader from the database. I wonder how much of this, if any of this, would be useful in a distributed project setting.

Seems that building a very integrated, very localized, and very quirky pipeline tool is the current state-of-the-art. Building a facility-independent, general-purpose tool really seems like the better way to go (see: Temerity Software’s Pipeline) but perhaps hasn’t caught on everywhere yet.