Publishing to Wiretap

The Wiretap protocol allows some degree of data exchange between Autodesk Toxik and Autodesk editing and effects products, such as Smoke and Flame. In a facility where Toxik is used with one of these Wiretap-compatible products, publishing to Wiretap is an easy way for you to quickly make available the rendered result of a composition to the Flame or Smoke user—see Navigating and Browsing.

If the Wiretap mode is enabled for the selected publish mode, a clip is created with the Toxik rendered media on the Flame or Smoke workstation, provided a Wiretap server is running on the remote host—see Accessing the IFFFS Libraries on the Network Using Wiretap.

When publishing to Wiretap, here is the general workflow:

Set the appropriate publish mode for the composition.

Select the publish mode for which you have enabled Wiretap.

Click the Publish button.

Use the File Browser to confirm that the clip has been created and published as expected on the Wiretap server. The clip name will be identical to the rendered file.

To set the Wiretap mode:

In the menu bar, select Edit > Preferences > Project.
In the Project Preferences window, select the Render tab.

(a) Render modes
Select a render mode.
The default format is EXR, but you can change it to your desired format if it is supported by the remote application, such as Flame.

NoteThe Wiretap mode is available in all publish modes except Snapshot, since that mode does not render.
Click the Wiretap button.
In the text field next to the Wiretap button, do one of the following:
- Type in the path.
- Using the File Browser, navigate to a Wiretap folder, right-click the item in the right pane, and select Copy Path. Paste the contents in the Wiretap field (Ctrl + Vfor Windows and Linux or Cmd + Vfor Mac OS).
- Using the File Browser, navigate to a Wiretap folder, select the path in the browser path text field, copy it (Ctrl + Cfor Windows and Linux or Cmd + Cfor Mac OS), and then paste it in the Wiretap field (Ctrl + Vfor Windows and Linux or Cmd + Vfor Mac OS). Either one of the following forms are acceptable:
- Wiretap:<servername>/…
  or
- <servername>/…
The server specified corresponds generally to an IFFFS server. In the text field, the prefix “Wiretap:” is stripped off if present, because it is implicit. For IFFFS, the path must specify a writable folder, which is either a library or a reel. For example: Wiretap:/belgium/stonefs/myProject/myLibrary/myReel/. The trailing slash is optional.

Troubleshooting Wiretap

If the clip is not publishing to Wiretap, it may be for one of the following reasons:

The Wiretap server on the destination host is down.
The file format chosen by the publish mode is unknown to the destination host, for example HDR.
The destination folder is not a library or a reel.
The library is already opened by a Smoke or Flame user on the remote machine which will only allow the read only mode.
A composition name contains parentheses.