Example Workflows
Chapter 1, Managing Projects

There are a few concepts you need to be familiar with when managing projects.

Project

A project is a container for a job in a facility. The scope of a project depends on your facility's needs or individual projects. It may be a complete film, a special effects shot, an image sequence, or any other collection of shots/images. From an administrative point of view, a project is a set of folders and a set of preferences.

When you start Toxik, you can only open one project at a time. To switch to a different project, you must first exit Toxik and then open that project.

The project folders contain the compositions in the project. When you create a project, it contains the default Footage folder. The Footage folder is a container for the media you import into a project.

Note: You can use scripts to automate the creation of projects, either to build a project structure from scratch, or to bring a project structure into Toxik (including media). For more information on scripts, see the Toxik Python® API online documentation (from the Windows Start menu, choose Programs > Autodesk > Autodesk Toxik 2009 > Toxik Documentation > Scripting API).

At the beginning of a project, you can define the following preferences:

• Archive-- The physical location of archives you create in Toxik, and the scripts that execute to perform archive and restore operations.

• Composition -- The default format for any compositions you create in the project.

• Publish -- These preferences apply to all published results created in the project. The name of the file that Toxik creates to save the media associated with a published result, the name of the folder in which the media is saved, and the name of the published result saved in the publish folder. These names can all contain variables, which ensure unique names across all results and their associated media files.

  Publish preferences also include the script that executes when you click Publish, and the program that monitors background rendering.

• Render--Lets you select a render mode and set the render preferences.

• Import-- The folder in which imported media is stored, and the script that is executed to copy the media to the local cache if you choose to cache during an import.

• Post-Import--Lets you execute any post-processing.

• Pre-Compositing--Lets you set the properties for working with pre-comp files-- see About Pre-Compositing

• Tools--Lets you set the path to the CTL tool-- see CTL Tool.

• Site Preferences--To set the preferences for shared storage

• Metadata--Displays the description of the composition you currently have open, along with any custom attributes you added. You can use this tab to edit the field associated with an individual attribute. This tab is also available in the User Preferences.

For more information, see Setting Project Preferences.