RVIO in a daily use
Every TD knows that command line tools are among the most powerful in their arsenal of tricks and secrets.
I want to mention RVIO, as today it saved me quite a lot of time (again), which is absolutely key when a deadline is coming.
My client requested a minor tweak of animation (a lip sync, to be concrete) on an almost finished shot. So, the general approach would be to do the change, have the animation data go through the pipeline and at the end have the finished frames ready to be loaded in an existing edit, which then gets rendered out and the final result gets showed to the client.
All fine, until you realize your render farm is completely full with other shots, so you have to skip the “beauty” pass rendering and only present the client with a, somehow, polished preview directly from your 3D package, which isn’t the safest way, trust me. But this client is great and understands that what he sees is actually only a preview of the animation.
So, the last piece of puzzle to solve is to get the preview assembled with additional layers of information (such as frame number, shot name etc…), basically a slightly customized overlay. All this sounds nice and simple, you just open up (in my case) Premiere Pro, swap the layers, render out the portion you need and be done with it.
But this certainly isn’t the TD way. 