File versioning/pipeline

Pipelines
1

Hi all,

I’m eager to pick some of your brains about file management. Until recently we just incremently saved out files and worked with that, and that was no problem, cause thete was always just 1 or 2 people working on a the same project. But now we’re ramping up on making a small animated series, so more people are getting involved and some freelancers will be put in as well. So now I’m looking into ways of setting up a logical and robust file pipeline. The main concerns for now are just the animation files. That’s motionbuilder FBX’s for the animation and Max files for rendering.

I have no experience with the Vault and absolutely no budget for something like alienbrain. I have good experience with tortoiseSVN for websites and other coding projects. But I don’t know if it is recommended and or robust enough for large files. Also we probably haven’t got the resources to go all out perforce (although I know not enough about it!)… I need a sort of turn key low cost solution.

I’m wondering how other compagnies are dealing with this?
Main thing for us is simplicity, uniformity and easy maintenance.

Any insights would be great!
Thanks,
-Johan

2

Folder structure and File naming conventions
Lots of good info here.

I’ve used TortoiseSVN for large binary files, and it can get pretty slow. But I don’t have much IT experience, there are probably ways to speed it up.

3

My last company used SVN, and it was slow. It’d take a good 5-10 minutes to sync in the morning and we didn’t have that many files, either, and it would really slow your entire machine. We did some things to speed it up (such as disabling explorer icons), and it helped, but it is slow with large binary files (such as ZTL’s). Not sure how much was hardware but it was just slow.

We use Perforce here and it is super-fast. For a half-dozen people, if you can’t afford it you can’t afford it, same with Alienbrain. Though SVN was slow, it worked fine, I would suggest just sticking with it.