Delivery to Vendor Service

The Delivery to Vendor Service uses ShotGrid and AWS to quickly and directly send files to Vendors. 

Details

The Delivery to Vendor Service is a custom feature of Artist Anywhere. Through using the Artist Anywhere Studio Workflows Tools, files are already in the the Artist Anywhere Cloud, and there is no need to upload the files before transferring them to a Vendor. Even a large number of files will transfer very quickly, as AWS can handle copying thousands of files in parallel.

You run the Delivery to Vendor Service through an automation within ShotGrid.

Initial Setup

For the Vendor to Delivery service to work with your files, there are some setup requirements:

• All files you wish to send must be linked to Versions in ShotGrid as Published Files.
• All files must have been ingested onto an Artist Anywhere server and uploaded to our Artist Anywhere Cloud. When the Ingest Queue(link) ingests files, it queues them for upload to the Artist Anywhere Cloud and they will be uploaded as fast as the connection allows. Files will likely be available a few minutes after ingest, but depending on volume, they may take longer.  
• The recipient must be a Group with a Vendor Bucket specified in the Vendor Remote Folder Field in ShotGrid.

User Interface and Workflow

Prepare Delivery

In order to send files, you must first link the files you wish to send to a Delivery record in ShotGrid.

To send only the EXR files in a Delivery, include _EXR, _EXRS, _exr, or _exrs at the end of the Delivery’s name, for example DeliveryToVendor_EXR or final_delivery_exrs.

The Playlist to Delivery App

We strongly suggest using the Playlist to Delivery app to create your Delivery. This tool takes a Playlist and converts it to a Delivery that is ready to send to a Vendor.

Manual Delivery Creation

Alternatively, you can create the Delivery record in ShotGrid manually and populate its Versions field with the Versions associated with the files you wish to deliver. 

You can specify Versions at Delivery record creation time: 

You can also add Versions to an existing Delivery record: 

Sending a Delivery

Once you’ve set up your Delivery record, you’ll need to set a few values on it, then it will be ready to send.

First, make sure your Delivery record’s Type field is set to Delivery or Delivery to Vendor (depending on setup) and the Delivery Method field is set to Cyclone. We recommend additionally filling in the Description field with any information the recipient needs to know.

Next, make sure the To and From fields are filled in correctly.

Set the Delivery’s Status field to Automate!

Do a final review to make sure all your data is correct and your Versions are exactly what you want to send.

Finally, click the Cyclone Deliver checkbox. This will trigger the automated delivery service.

The process will start, the Delivery’s Status field will update with changes, and when the delivery service has completed, it will set the Status field to Received, meaning that the Vendor has received your Delivery successfully.

Troubleshooting

If you follow the troubleshooting steps below and are still experiencing issues, please reach out to us at [e-mail].

Sending to Vendor

Artist Anywhere uses a unique identifier called a GUUID to track files throughout the transfer process. GUUIDs are generated as part of the ingest process, and most issues when sending arise because GUUIDs haven’t been generated yet. 

To confirm that files have GUIIDs, in ShotGrid, go to the Detail Page of the Version the files are linked to and navigate to the Published Files tab. There, you can check the GUUID Status field on each Published File. If any of those do not show OK, then GUUIDs have not been generated for those files, and you will be unable to send them.

There are a few possible reasons and fixes for this:

• The files were very recently ingested, and the GUUID generation portion of the ingest process has not completed yet. This can take a few minutes after ingest to complete. Wait a few minutes and try again.
• AWS or ShotGrid was under maintenance or experiencing an outage. If an ingest occurs under those conditions, Artist Anywhere should go back and generate any missing GUUIDs. But if it hasn’t done so, right-click on any Versions that do not have a GUUID and select Update GUUIDs from the resulting context menu. They should generate within a few minutes of running the tool.

You’ll need to be logged into ShotGrid Desktop in order for the Update GUUIDs menu item to show up.

• There is a path issue, most often caused by capitalization problems.Windows and Mac do not treat "A" and "a" as different letters, but the Artist Anywhere tools do. So, if an expected folder path is previz but someone has manually created a folder named Previz, the file will ingest but the GUUID will not generate. Ensure that there are no character case mismatches between paths in ShotGrid and on disk and try again.
• File count mismatch: When sending EXRs, if the number of files found does not match the expected number of files, an error will be generated. For EXR sequences, you can look at the GUUID Name field on the Published File to troubleshoot GUUID issues for individual frames and get more information by clicking on individual GUUIDs. If there is a discrepancy between the number of items in this field and the number of frames in the EXR sequence, then this is the source of the problem. If there are duplicate GUUIDs, you can delete the duplicates. If there are missing GUUIDs, then you’ll need to reingest the sequence.  If this is a duplicated published frame, you can delete it on the GUUID’s detail page. If a frame is missing, you will need to reingest the Submission.

Vendor Receiving

Vendors receive files from Artist Anywhere via their Vendor Bucket in AWS. They receive the following when we onboard them to Artist Anywhere:

1. The instructions for downloading a the third-party tool needed to access their Vendor Bucket
2. The Keys needed to pull files from the Bucket

They may experience issues with either the keys or bucket access. 

• Key issues: If the Vendor cannot access or download from the Bucket, please have them reach out to us at [e-mail] to confirm their keys are active. 
• Bucket access issues: It is not uncommon for Vendors, who have strict security requirements, to have firewall rules that can prevent accessing their bucket. If a Vendor mentions that they get Server not found or a similarly worded error when trying to access the Bucket, that means either they have the bucket name wrong or their firewall is blocking access. Please have them confirm the Bucket name (generally productionname-vendorname) and make sure they have opened their firewall to reach the Bucket via https at s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname.