This post is a little less technical than what I've been writing mostly. It's about my time working show-side in VFX and the lessons I learned.

Background​

In 2026, I spent 6 months working on a large scale film production involving the biggest vendors in the industry. I learned a huge amount and I'm excited to share what I can. It was challenging at first to switch gears from my previous, more technical role. Honestly, I only really got good at this job about 5 months and 29 days in, but this experience gave me a valuable perspective that I'm hoping to share here.

1. Filemaker Pro 🗃️ - Production tracking... if you're up for the challenge.
2. BBEdit 📝 - The veteran Mac text editor. I use this for its super unique option-click feature that lets you select segments of text vertically.
3. Cinesync 🔄 - Remote review tool for VFX and post-production.
4. Clearview Flex 🔻 - Secure remote video playback and streaming tool for reviewing film and VFX content at a distance.
5. Griptape 🩹 - Python framework for building AI workflows, recently acquired by The Foundry.
6. Docker 🐳 - Containerizing and solving the age old "works on my machine" discussion.
7. Figma 🎨 - Collaborative design tool I've been using to wireframe ideas for Dailies Notes Assistant and mapping out production workflow diagrams.
8. promptfoo 🥋 - Advanced open source LLM prompt testing that I'm using to benchmark prompts for an Academy Software Foundation project.
9. Bluesky 🦋 - Social media for the conscientious that let me leave Meta in 2026.
10. Hugo 🅷 - Markdown native, static site generator that I use for The Apple Box Collection.

This post is about a common gotcha when transcoding QuickTime containers for review, and how I fixed it this one time.

Where people trip up​

Here's a scenario that will be familiar to anyone who's ever used QuickTime Player for editorial or client review: you render a DNxHD file. Same source, same codec, same colorspace. You open it up and it looks noticeably different; maybe lifted, maybe with a gamma shift, maybe slightly desaturated. You bring it into Nuke or something similar, with no color transforms applied, read as raw data, and it's pixel-for-pixel what you were looking at before. So what's going on?

The answer, more often than not, lives in the QuickTime container's color metadata, specifically the NCLC atom.

This post covers show-side production tracking in the visual effects industry - looking specifically at tools used to maintain and communicate a database of work on film and television projects. I'm including a simple python script that I set up to quickly A/B dailies against previous versions in Nuke.

I've worked for a studio, I've worked for a vendor, but for the longest time, show-side work has been this big mystery to me. I always figured it was vastly different to anything I'd done before. I've been working show-side on a large project for the last couple months; it's early days but I've learned a few things, so here goes.

In this post, I showcase a fun integration with Pro-Tools and take a look at what makes MASV a great tool for large file sending.

Meet MASV​

MASV is a cloud-native Managed File Transfer service with a long list of multi-industry use-cases. The idea is, rather than trying to manage your own transfer setup, you give that responsibility to MASV who has built out the infrastructure to safely and speedily transfer your files. It's important to note, most MFT companies are not reinventing protocols, they're wrapping them with security and reliability enhancements, a job that would be a headache to do in-house. MASV's specific approach is to provide users with a store and forward model, primarily utilizing Amazon Web Services as their backbone. What this means is users have the flexibility to upload their files, and grab them whenever they want, including while they're still uploading: see MASV Express. With this model, the transfer has a middle man, that for most intents and purposes, is secure and compliant, but that's a consideration some users have to make.

This post covers pretty senior level work volunteered by some serious veterans in the industry - so with that in mind, I am adding to the project humbly with the perspective I've gained as a previous coordinator. I'm hoping to add that perspective here to help build a useful LLM assisted note-taking process.

What is 'DNA' so far?​

'DNA' stands for Dailies Notes Assistant. It's a new open-source project in early development by folks contributing at the Academy Software Foundation. The idea behind the project is to scope out the usefulness of integrating LLM transcriptions with the VFX note-taking process. A heavy emphasis on utility rather than novelty is at the center of the project — as well as a thoughtfulness about adding to rather than taking away from the work of production professionals.

This post is a review of Resilio Active Everywhere and their Slipstream features. This post also outlines a Resilio ShotGrid integration using a webhooks workflow. Here's the demo video and GitHub repository for that. This post is not sponsored.

Introduction​

For a couple years now, I've been wondering about the best setups for data distribution in Visual Effects. How do you get shots to clients? How do you make it easy for artists, working from a million different places, to access data and plates? In 2024, I wrote about a new company called Suite Studios, and recently in August, I revisited the subject, writing about the whole landscape for file streaming and data-distribution. At Baked Studios, I put together a workflow that incorporated file streaming, and it worked for the most part, but there was always some parameter, some feature that didn't work perfectly for us. It seemed impossible to find a platform that could tick every box.

It's September 2025 now, and I think I've found the workflow I was looking for.

This post is about creating guides in nuke for vendor-side VFX internal reviews. Full demo here and Git Repo with Script here

Introduction​

The VFX for Spike Lee's film Highest 2 Lowest were done in large part at Baked Studios in New York City. The film had a long list of camera formats used during shooting and each camera had its own crop factor from plate to what was in the edit. This presented us with a challenge to manage aspect ratios with letterboxing along with these overall crop factors programmatically from shot to shot.

Tcl (Pronounced "Tickle") is a scripting language that Nuke modifies to create an expression language specialized for compositing math. Nuke's Tcl expressions can be used to great effect for simple modifications to knob parameters via mathematical expressions with its syntax.

Baked Studios by the time I left, had a robust python based pipeline integrated with ShotGrid toolkit. Largely built by U.K company Nodes & Layers, this pipeline allowed us to pull data from ShotGrid into nuke for slates, burnins, and various Tcl expressions if needed. The details of this workflow are largely proprietary and out of the scope of this blog post, but I encourage people to reach out to both Baked Studios and Nodes & Layers for details and or services.

TLDR: This is about a storage clean-up tool and why your Gen-Z coordinators need to be using Nuke Assist.

Why Nuke Assist Actually Slaps​

Nuke Assist is a limited version of Nuke that comes packaged twice with each NukeX or Studio license. This extra version of the software is extremely useful in a large studio pipeline because it lets you break up work and licenses in a way that is efficient and cost effective. The limitations (no write nodes, limited comp nodes, gizmos etc...) are a feature and not a bug. You can use nuke --assist for paint, roto and tracking work, while breaking out final comp and render work for regular nuke. Similarly, certain coordinator tasks like ingesting, as well as some supervisor tasks like node tree hygiene checks, can also be done using nuke --assist. This article is going to focus on the coordinator's use-case and how Nuke Assist can help act as a connection layer between Autodesk ShotGrid and a filesystem. First, a little history.

This is a blog post about data-distribution in VFX. This post also touches on cloud vs on-prem, and how file-streaming adds new opportunities and challenges to the debate.

Why File Streaming?​

Ever since the pandemic, post-production houses of all sizes have been exploring the best ways to work remotely. Remote desktop emerged to bridge existing on-premise environments with this new world order. However, some began to wonder about the need for on-prem in the first place. Cloud workflows reemerged as a solution, and file-streaming services came onto the scene boasting the ability to work from anywhere. In the midst of the age-old fierce debate of cloud vs on-prem, file streaming entered the chat.