Mastodawn

IBM Aspera is a commercial and pricey file transfer service that is used a lot in the VFX industry.
Rocky Linux 9 is an operating system that is used a lot in the VFX industry.

IBM has retired their file transfer client and the new app no longer works on Rocky Linux 9. it requires release 10.

Rocky Linux 10 is not used in the VFX industry a lot yet because the major apps we use don’t support it yet (officially that is) and 9 isn‘t end of life yet by a long shot.

😩

#VFXPipeline #VFX

Stefan Ihringer Apr 30

All requests that a VFX TD receives can be divided into 3 categories:

1. I'm too lazy to push a button. Can the push be automated?
2. I'm too much of a micro-manager to push 1 button. Can you please cram 5 buttons into this GUI for me?
3. Why is this a button? At my previous company they had a dropdown for this. It would run a database query over 200 tables before it would display the GUI and it was very slow but I think it was quite elegant for this particular corner case.

#VFXPipeline

Stefan Ihringer Apr 28

My current task for our #VFXPipeline is to accomodate Windows users in a Linux pipeline. Easiest option: give every Photoshop artist a Linux workstation for Nuke. Seems to be a common thing. But out of curiosity (and to be prudent with hardware) I‘m trying to get everything working on Windows. A constant source of sadness I have to say, worse than UTF8 strings in Python 2.

Stefan Ihringer Apr 26

Our #VFXPipeline, database and renderfarm also supports shot numbers with emojis. Need to find my post about this from a few years ago 😁
Maybe I should test it again to make sure it still works. Back then, all I had to do was disable a regular expression that enforced alphanumeric characters. https://mastodon.social/@Edent/116436067873523016

Stefan Ihringer Apr 5

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116351915067362732

Important read in a light tone! This is what I also see when it comes to a #VFXPipeline: pumping out code is not the problem. And we're not solving hard stuff like writing our own render engine.
My job is to say "no" a lot ("no you won't get a button to skip sanity checks"). If I added a checkbox every time a coworker wanted one, our tools would have an unusable GUI.

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Liam.c Mar 6

I swear Prism is 90% of my frustration at work.
I can't believe how a simple design mistake is able to create so much instability while preventing any fix with wrappers.
What design mistake ?
- Prism set environment variables from the Python runtime by modifying `os.environ` .
- You may define different variables per project.
- You can switch project while in the same software session
This is an absolute nightmare to manage.
There's no ideal workaround.
#vfxPipeline

Stefan Ihringer Feb 22

We haven't worked with DPX files for years, but the pipeline I built still supports them. I fear that once I remove all the `or ext == ".dpx"` parts in the code a client will pop up who doesn't use EXR files.

#VFXPipeline

Stefan Ihringer Feb 16

Nuke bug of the day: Nuke's color pipeline breaks with completely nonsensical errors whenever you add the keyword "default_view_transform:" to your OCIO configuration. That's really weird because it doesn't really do anything color-related except define which value the viewer should be set to initially.

#Nuke #VFXPipeline #OpenColorIO

Stefan Ihringer Dec 15, 2025

For #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm highlighting open-source tools in our #VFXpipeline. Today: #OpenColorIO

OCIO is a library that is part of all modern DCC applications. It color-manages images, that is: add or remove gamma corrections, apply LUTs (look-up tables) and so on in a well-defined way. Before OCIO for example, every application had to write their own formulas for sRGB or logarithmic curves and one program might load LUTs in format A but the other needed format B.

https://opencolorio.org

OpenColorIO

Open Source Color Management

Stefan Ihringer Dec 9, 2025

Had to debug a weird #Houdini color issue yesterday. Turns out that if you're using a custom #OCIO config file without file rules, Houdini will apply its own set. And as of Houdini 21 those are no longer "OpenEXR is scene linear". It seems to apply the file rules from its default ocio file which assigns "Linear Rec.709 (sRGB)" if it exists and only uses scene_linear if it doesn't. So if you add a space of that name, suddenly all existing scenes will look different than before 😱
#VFXPipeline