Allow uploaded metadata to appear in review session PDFs
Lernie Ang
We are currently using SyncSketch to review some work, and downloading PDFs to gather the notes from the session.
We have a database system (i.e. FTrack) to communicate to artists notes about their work. We want to create a tool to read the SyncSketch PDFs and automatically send the notes contained inside to the proper database item.
However, we face the problem of associating a particular media with an item in our database; for complicated workflow reasons, the filepath that was originally uploaded to SyncSketch is not robust method to identify the database entity. The ideal thing would be to use its actual database id.
In SyncSketch PDFs, we are able to to see the uploader name and the name of the media, but it would be great if we can inject more metadata during upload, for example, our database id, and that will reflect in each reviewed media in the PDF.
Rok Kogovšek
I agree that injecting custom metadata, perhaps in JSON format would be a welcome addition to the API on both Review and Item level.
We already use the ShotGrid info stored under the review's "metadata" key for debugging our automatisation and plan to use it even for reverse direction web hooks.
I propose extending the "metadata" JSON with a reserved "custom" key to inject a custom sub-JSON inside the SyncSketch JSON. Should be doable if some sanity and code injection prevention checks are implemented.
Btw. Lernie are the visual annotations the reason you are using PDF instead of CSV, which is much straight-forward to implement automatisations for?
Lernie Ang
Hi Rok Kogovšek, yes, the drawn annotations are the primary reason. We strip the PDFs for its images, and then publish them along with the text.
Afaik, the CSV won't contain any custom metadata as well, am I correct? If it did, it would be adequate sidecar for the time being.
Lernie Ang
Re API, we don't leverage the API to talk directly to our pipeline, and thus our database, due to security issues (I believe), so PDFs are a secure way of getting review session data back.
Rok Kogovšek
Hey Lernie Ang indeed the only fields that one sees in a current CSV are:
Project Name,Review Name,Item SortOrder,Item Name,Item Status,Date Created,Frame Number,Timecode,Comment,Email,Full Name,Link,Note Status