Production Planning
Warning
Ramses is still under active development, and this documentation is still being written.
We strongly invite you to read the changelog to know what’s going on, and especially to have a look at the known issues.
As Ramses is able to (automatically) estimate the time needed for the production of the individual assets and shots, it can help you plan the production, and keep track of the time needed to produce any project.
At the step level, default estimations can be set to be used on shots and assets, depending on the difficulty of their productions. Then, each individual estimation can be customized for a finer evaluation of the time needed for the production.
Estimations
To establish a realistic schedule, it is important to be able to estimate the time needed to produce the project, as well as tracking the production to adjust these estimations if needed.
Ramses helps you to quickly estimate this time needed, and then helps you to make it as precise as you need.
The unit used for estimations by Ramses is the day (which can be divided into smaller parts of a day if you need). Counting in days is precise enough for planning a production, and this way you don’t need to know exactly how many hours are (actually) worked in a day.
Note
There’s no way with Ramses to link the production tracking data to individual users (meaning that there’s no easy way to build statistics about users or compare their productivity). That’s by design, don’t ask for it.
Step estimations
For each step, it is possible to set a default estimation which will be used for all assets and shots.
This estimation, usually set in days of work, can vary with the difficulty for the production of each specific asset or shot; Ramses lets you define an estimation for five predefined levels of difficulty: very easy, easy, medium, hard, very hard.
This default estimation is used to automatically evaluate the time needed for the production of the whole step, depending on the assets or shots which have to be produced, at first based on a medium difficulty. Adjusting the difficulty per shot or asset will then automatically update the global estimation to raise the precision.
For the production of shots, the estimations can also be optionnaly and automatically multiplied by the duration of the shot, so that the estimation can be made per second instead of per shot, and also by the number of assets used by the shot, for example to multiply the estimation by the number of characters in the shot.
▹ Step management in the Ramses Client Application.
Asset and shots estimations
The estimation set by default by the step and automatically computed based on the number of assets, the duration and the difficulty can always be individually overriden for each shot and asset, for a more precise control on the estimations.
This is done through the Production Tracking
▹ Production tracking in the Ramses Client Application.
Schedule
Based on the estimations, Ramses evaluates the number of days of work needed to complete the work on each step for all assets and shots.
It is then easier to prepare the production planning and establish a schedule, by assigning days of work to users and steps.
Ramses will keep track of the number of days already assigned and missing (or extra) days to help you plan the production.
In case of lateness on the production of a step (shown by Ramses), it means the quantity or the diffuclty of the work was underestimated; all that needs to be done is then to adjust the estimations at the step level to update all assets and shots estimations, then check if the schedule can still be respected, or assign more users or days of work to the step.