What is the crowd's opinion of
ftrack?
From 3.5 billion comments
5 reviews of this app found across the web:
>Quick turnaround is a necessity, since we create the body of an episode in only a few weeks and the topical intro to the episode in only two or three days
From here
Seems like they cheat it a bit. The intro may have had a quick production time, but the majority of the episode was already in the can.
For reference, Southpark can be under a week.
Even with that technology, Our Cartoon President episodes still typically took a few weeks to produce from start to finish, with the topical intro being done last.
I like Ftrack because it’s not terribly difficult to get running, and it’s basically hands off once it’s going. It’s also very artist friendly, almost no learning curve for end users. Simple task dashboards and has a solid review tool built in. You can super quickly do batch assignments and as a supe I found it very easy to build “views” and comb through tons of shots of varying statuses.
This case study is from my former shop
https://www.ftrack.com/en/portfolio/steelhead-cuts-through-complexity-with-ftrack
FWIW, shotgun isn’t a bad tool, it can do some really powerful stuff, but I find it tedious as a supe and as an artist
A live sync session is available on all plans, including ftrack Review, so you could run a live synchronous review for as little as $15/mo (or even less with annual plans). https://www.ftrack.com/en/pricing
As for free projects, I've been doing rather well with a combination of Trello and Google Sheets.
Trello for whats to do in the near future and Google Sheets to have an overview over all assets, their current status and general progress.
Here's two images from different projects to give you an idea. I went ahead and made pretty much everything either unreadable or replaced it with a general term because I'm not quite free to share details. But I hope it gives an idea anyway!
Project Overview & Timeline
If you have a little budget and may work with freelancers / collaborators, I can recommend ftrack instead. Takes some time getting used to but has served us well!