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Connector Spotlight: ShotGrid

Shane Workman Aug 9, 2022

Synchronize your Projectal data in real-time with ShotGrid, a premier tool from Autodesk for tracking and managing assets during production.

At creative studios, ShotGrid (previously Shotgun) is a widely used task and asset management application. Many studios that use Projectal also use ShotGrid to help their artists manage their tasks, along with organizing and reviewing their digital assets.

A connector was built by the Projectal Integration team to enable seamless communication between Projectal and ShotGrid. The connector synchronizes projects, tasks, and staff assignments between Projectal and ShotGrid in real-time using the Projectal API, webhooks, and Python libraries. This ensures that any changes to projects, tasks, or crew at your studio are always updated in both Projectal and ShotGrid. This enables you to precisely estimate, plan, schedule, and track your projects while always being aware of your staffing demands.

Data mapping between Projectal and ShotGrid

The ShotGrid connector from Projectal is versatile and can be quickly modified to match the setup and customizations you've made to ShotGrid at your studio.

The following data can be synced dynamically between ShotGrid and Projectal:

Projects and associated information, such as name, description, status, start and end date, budget, and task breakdown
Task identifiers, names, descriptions, dates, durations, ETC, actual work effort, staff assignments, costs, and status
Assignments of staff members to jobs, including their names, email addresses, and current work effort
Task breakdown and hierarchy, including asset, sequence, shot, and other breakdowns
Various task status values, such as "ready," "in process," "client review," "finished," and more
From the first to the last task, in task order
Task notes, containing notes from the artist, the producer, and the client

Real-time Sync

Webhook functionality is present in both Projectal and ShotGrid, and our connector makes use of this to allow real-time syncing between the two tools. This makes sure that anytime changes are made, your Projectal and ShotGrid are immediately updated. There are no longer any manual processes, spreadsheets, or data double-entry. To ensure that the team tracking the project is constantly kept up to date, changes made by an artist to a task in ShotGrid are automatically synced into Projectal. Or, when a member of the Production team allocates an artist to a task in Projectal, that artist is immediately assigned and informed of it in ShotGrid.

The following Projectal screenshot shows the producer or supervisor's view of a project:

...and in ShotGrid, the artists view of the same project, synced in real-time:

Staging

When you are in the early stages of bidding, budgeting, or planning projects in Projectal, you may not want to add these to ShotGrid until they are ready to be turned over to your Production team. Our connector can be easily configured to match your workflow, so that only projects that have been awarded are added to ShotGrid. This is a useful method for staging your projects as they go through the bidding, budgeting, and planning stages.

Availability

The ShotGrid connector is now free for all Projectal customers. Our Integration team will assist you in adapting it to match your ShotGrid configuration, as well as installing it so that your studio has real-time syncing between Projectal and ShotGrid by Autodesk.