Changelog

2.39.0

• Implement element ingestion matrix (#148)

  Dragging media sources into smartElements launches now the smartElements ingestion matrix. This window lets you manage your ingstions and set up various things - including media transcodings during the ingestion. For more information how the ingestion matrix works please refer smartElement’s media ingestion documentation page.

2.38.0

• Optimize for fullscreen mode (#159)

  The element widgets scale now with the main window when resizing it. The display for gallery view has been improved.

• Speed up media crawl when ingesting (#158)

  Dropping a folder scans it for all ingestable media before the actual ingestion starts. This crawl process has been massively speed up.

• Add hotkey overview (#144)

  smartElements contains multiple hotkeys. The help menu (top right in the main window) contains now a hotkey overview so that you can quickly refer back to these.

• Override hard/soft copy ingestion mode via environment variable (#160)

  Set the environment variable ‘CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_INGEST_HARDCOPY’ to ‘True’ to enforce ingesting using a hard copy, i.e. the media to ingest gets physically copied to the selected list. Set the environment variable ‘CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_INGEST_SOFTCOPY’ to ‘True’ enforce ingesting using a soft copy, i.e. the media to ingest does NOT get physically copied to the selected list. When inserting the media into a working file this will then reference the original media. Use one of these environment variables. These override any import processor settings when they are set.

• Keep filter when switching viewing modes and switching lists (#156)

  When switching viewing modes and lists the currently set up element filter gets preserved.

• Wrap very long element names into multiple lines (#157)

  Very long element names get not wrapped into multiple lines to ensure the full element name gets preserved. This happens in the list view and in the element quick info view.

• Move selected elements to other category (#161)

  Select one or many elements, right click and choose ‘Move…’ from the context menu. In the upcoming dialog choose the new list to add the selected element(s) to.

2.37.0

• Add live filter (#153)

  This update adds a live filtering feature into smartElements. While the lists and tags section let you categorize and group elements, the live filter feature lets you apply complex filtering to find exactly what you need across all category lists. Any new element that matches the given rules shows up in the live filters, too.

• Implement to abort ingestion (#152)

  When ingesting elements you will now find an ‘Abort Ingestion’ button on the bottom left. Clicking it will abort all open ingestion jobs in the ingestion queue. Elements that have been fully ingested remain.

• Search: Allow regular expressions (#154)

  The search section allows now to enter regular expressions. This gives you a lot more flexibility to find exactly what you need.

• Fix ingest via api in standalone mode exited silently (#151)

2.36.0

• Add element history section (#117)

  Press P or click the element history button at the top of smartElements to view the history of recently used elements. Click the insert button to insert these in your DAG. Click the reveal button to navigate to the element in your library inside smartElements.

• Auto set thumbnail (#139)

  The ‘thumbnail_frame’ in the PreviewCreator ingestion processor is now by default set to ‘auto’. This will automatically find out and set the most representable thumbnail frame when ingesting.

  You can also auto set thumbnails on multiple elements in one go. Select multiple elements and choose from the context menu: ‘Preview -> Set thumbnail -> auto’ This becomes quite handy on elements that start and end with a back background, e.g. muzzle flashes, explosions, dirt charges, etc.

• Search: Add ‘is not’ and ‘does not contain’ operators (#147)

  When searching for elements you can now also the ‘is not’ and ‘does not contain’ operators to filter out any element that does not meet a given condition.

• Use more accurate progress bar when ingesting (#149)

  Elements that are currently ingesting show a progressbar. In previous versions this showed only a progress step per run ingestion processor. With this update we have made the progress more detailed and added more sub steps. This gives you a more accurate result where an element’s current ingestion status currently is.

• Settings - ingest processors | import processors: show help buttons (#140)

  Add help button that browses users to advanced documentation section directly. The advanced documentation section shows configuration values to use for ingest and import processors.

• Playlist widget list: don’t show playlists that don’t exist on disk (#109)

  Over time you might remove playlists from disk when they are no longer needed. With that, they shouldn’t be displayed in smartElements anymore when they are not accessible anyways.

2.35.0

• Create element ingestion report (#145)

  Right click a list and choose ‘Generate new elements report…’ from the context menu. This launches a dialog in which you can specify the time range of newly ingested elements to put into a report. You can export as HTML, PDF and CSV file.

2.34.0

• Add API (#77)

  smartElements provides an Application Programming Interface (API) which lets you communicate with smartElements from the outside. This lets you for example query stacks, lists, settings and elements and manipulate them, add new entries, update and delete them and ingest new elements - everything outside of smartElements and outside of Nuke. This lets you now to perform automations of various kinds without the need to use smartElement’s graphical user interface (GUI). For more information please refer to the API section in our documentation.

2.33.0

• Add additional metadata and search elements by metadata (#137)

  Right click one or several elements and execute ‘Add metadata’ from the context menu to add additional metadata for all selected elements. Elements can now also be searched by metadata.

• Search elements by width, height, frame length (#114)

  When filtering elements you can specify the width, height and frame length. You can search elements that have exactly the entered value as well as less than and more than the entered value.

2.32.0

• Update to nuke-15 (#135)

• Fix: Stop player when element is no longer played (#134)

2.31.0

• Gallery View: Show QuickInfo (#133)

  The gallery view contains now a configurable quick info that lets you view additional information for all elements like name, resolution and used count so that you can quicker find what you are interested in. The quick info and the details to show can be turned on and off in the settings section.

2.30.0

• Add Home View showing preview thumbnails for each list (#132)

2.29.0

• Implement element Head-up-Display (#123)

2.28.1

• Speed up launching time when being in offline mode (#131)

  If your machine is not connected to the web we recommend to set the environment variable CRAGL_NO_WEB to 'True'. This will speed up launching smartElements.

2.28.0

• Add button to toggle play/stop all elements (#119)

• Play all selected elements (#122)

• Notify when trying to ingest to the ‘ALL’ list (#120)

• Fix: color dialog is under smartElements main window on windows (#126)

2.27.0

• Add studio model (#116)

2.26.0

• Bulk adjust thumbnail for multiple elements (#113)

  Select multiple elements and set thumbnails for all of them in one go. This is particularly useful if your current list contains many elements that start with a black frame like smoke, dust, fire, explosions, etc. and progress over time. In these cases using a middle or end frame as thumbnail should get you 95% there and you can tweak the thumbnails for specific elements manually afterwards.

• Add filter section, order elements in ascending and descending order (#107)

  The element search widget was moved into a dedicated filter section that can be toggled in visibility (shortcut: F).

• Drive visibility of local ‘default’ stack by environment variable (#112)

  Setting the environment variable CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_HIDE_DEFAULT_STACK to True will hide the local ‘default’ stack. This environment variable is useful for larger studios in combination with the environment variable CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_ADDITIONAL_STACKS to drive the visibility of stacks seen by the artists.

• Fix: Deleting all stacks lets a user not create a new stack (#110)

  In previous versions, smartElements always required having one active stack set. One user mistakenly removed all stacks from the stacks dropdown menu. This caused some issues in various places as smartElements needs an active stack and this prevented the user from restoring stack locations back to their settings. This has been fixed. You can now remove all stacks from the stacks dropdown - either willingly or mistakenly - and can then add stacks back to the stacks dropdown menu without running into an issue.

2.25.0

• Make preview frame to use when ingesting configurable (#108)

  The ‘Ingest Processors’ section in the settings contains now a ‘thumbnail_frame’ configuration for the ‘PreviewCreator’ ingestion processor. Choose between ‘start’, ‘middle’ or ‘and’ to automatically render the first, middle or last frame of each element as thumbnail frame when ingesting.

2.24.0

• Configure to mark new elements (#105)

  This update adds a new checkbox ‘Inform about new elements’. Turning it on will mark all elements that get ingested from now on with a green border. This accounts only for elements that weren’t ingested by yourself of course. Elements can be marked as seen then.

2.23.0

• Versionize elements (#101)

  Right click any element and choose ‘New version…’ from the context menu to create a new version for the element. Any regular element insertion uses always the latest version; Use the version dropdown in the SideBar info panel to insert an explicit version. Element version paths stay consistent so nothing used gets offline.

• Support .mxf video files (#103)

  This update lets you now ingest .mxf files that are natively readable in Nuke.

2.22.0

• Colorize lists, tags and elements to quicker find items (#100)

  Lists, tags and elements can now be tinted with a custom color to quicker find often used items. Right click any list from the elements list on the left, any tag from the tag list on the left or any element in the library and choose ‘Color -> set’ from the context menu to set a custom color. Choose ‘Color -> unset’ to remove the custom color.

  Custom colors get stored locally on a user basis so each user can set their own colors.

• Add additional data to elements (#102)

  Sometimes it is desirable to store any additional data to an element, e.g. color file, license file, footage for toolsets, etc. This update lets you do that. Right click an element and choose ‘Add additional files’ from the context menu. When bringing an element into your DAG that contains additional element files you will be asked if you would like to reveal the additional element files. In smartElement’s settings you can change that policy from ‘ask’ to ‘always’ reveal or ‘never’ reveal.

• Keep info window fully in screen (#99)

  Hover over an element and hold the Alt key to get additional information about the element in the element info window. In previous versions the info window was moved under the current mouse cursor position, however when the library is located near the bottom of the screen then the info window was cut off. We removed moving the info window under the current mouse cursor position.

2.21.0

• Update to nuke-14 (#98)

2.20.0

• Implement favorite sync to view favorites from other users (#92)

• Add ‘All’ list that shows all elements of a stack (#97)

2.19.0

• Add ‘jkl’ shortcuts to rewind, play/stop, forward for video widget (#91)

  Hold ctrl/cmd and press j and l to rewind/play in sub steps. When bringing an element into node graph the speed mode gets applied to the node as well using a Retime node. The UI also gained a playback speed dropdown to adjust the current video playback speed. Note that this dropdown as well as the shortcuts are only available when setting the playback mode in smartElement’s settings to ‘loop’. When being in ‘scrub’ mode this won’t be applied.

• Toggle flip flop mode for videos using shortcut ‘f’ (#96)

  Hover over a video and press f to toggle between normal viewing mode, flip, flop and flip-flop. When bringing an element into node graph the viewing mode gets applied to the node as well using a Mirror node.

2.18.1

• Fix: Custom onDrop callback overwrites default drop callback (#95)

2.18.0

• Implement media playlists (#83)

  Media playlists are collections of media from any list in any stack. They let you bundle media elements that you can then re-use and share with your team.

2.17.0

• Enhance overall performance and speed up ingesting elements (#89)

  smartElements has gained an additional performance boost. Especially ingesting elements should now be a lot faster and smoother.

• Show element info as tooltip (#80)

  You can now enable element info as tooltip. Whenever you hover over an element, important information for the current element will be displayed immediately. Showing element info as tooltip can be enabled and disabled in the settings by checking/unchecking the ‘Show element info tooltip’ checkbox.

• Lock selected stacks via environment variable (#81)

  Stacks that are listed in CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_LOCKED_STACKS will be locked. Concatenate multiple paths with the operating system’s path separator.

• Show current stack in window title (#87)

  The currently selected stack gets now shown in smartElement’s window title.

• Add progressbar for ingesting jobs (#85)

  Each element contains a progress bar while ingesting to show the current progress when ingesting.

• Add element ingestion live log (#90)

  The ingestion log can be viewed live to see where the element is currently at.

2.16.0

• Add sidebar info on the right (#76)

  Clicking the sidebar info button on the top left launches the sidebar info on the right. This widget gives you more information about the currently selected element and lets you trigger certain actions like inserting, setting favorite rate, exploring in explorer, adding tags and comments, etc. Use Ctrl + -> to show the sidebar and ctrl + <- to hide it.

• Add documentation button (84)

  A documentation button was added to the top right of the smartElement’s main window. Clicking it browses to smartElement’s online documentation.

• Fix: Metadata is not correctly ingested when ingesting under Nuke-13 (#86)

2.15.1

• Fix: Ingesting broke with previous update (#82)

2.15.0

• Add functionality to mark elements as deprecated (#79)

2.14.0

• Fix: Filmstrip view does not display the last element (#78)

• Ingest from .txt file (#74)

  Drop a .txt file containing one media path per line and smartElements will ingest all these stated media elements into the currently selected list.

2.13.0

• Implement filmstrip viewing mode (#75)

  smartElements offers a thumbnail view and a list view to view elements. Now, it gained another view - the filmstrip view. This view contains thumbnails in a horizontal layout and a large video player. This view helps you to quicker watch all elements in a larger format and in more detail.

2.12.0

• Add fullscreen player mode (#73)

  Select an element from the library and press the spacebar to view it in fullscreen mode. Press the spacebar again to leave fullscreen. While in fullscreen mode you can also use the arrow keys to cycle through different elements.

• Add comment to element in thumbnail view (#71)

  Comments can now also be added in thumbnail view. Right click an element and choose ‘Comment’ to enter/update a comment on the currently selected element in thumbnail view. A comment adds useful information for you and others and you can search for elements by comment.

• Improve favorite rating system (#68)

  In previous version an element could either be set as favorite or not. Now, each element can get a rating from 0 up to 5 stars and you can individually view elements of these ratings to better differentiate between favorite elements.

2.11.0

• Add context menu command to play all elements at once (#67)

  Right click any element and choose ‘View -> Play all’ from the context menu to play all elements from the current list at once. Choose ‘View -> Stop all’ to stop all elements. Having the ability to watch all elements playing at once gives flexibility in viewing many elements in context to each other. This can then sometimes enhance quicker finding fitting elements for your current needs.

2.10.0

• Show progressbar when loading elements (#64)

  When loading elements, this update will now show a progress bar at the bottom left, indicating the current loading progress.

• Use continuous loading for elements (#65)

  In previous versions, -all- elements of a list had loaded in the background before displaying. With this update we use a continuous load approach in order to quicker serve you with using elements.

• Add elements view limit (#66)

  At the top right of the smartElements main window you will now now find widgets to limit loading by n elements in order to quicker serve you with using elements.

2.9.1

• Fix ImportError for Python-3 (#63)

2.9.0

• Introduce media playback option, implement to scrub media (#60)

  In the settings section you can now configure the behavior of media playback. Setting it to ‘loop’ will loop the media as long as you hover over it. Use ‘scrub’ to scrub through the media by moving your mouse.

• Support ingesting R3D files (#58)

• Fix creating full length preview when ingesting .mp4 files (#61)

• Add most used section (#62)

• Add history section (#59)

2.8.1

• Fix dropping license into license window raises UnicodeDecodeError (#57)

2.8.0

• Fix reading trial license data fails decrypting (#55)

• Send email to license author when machine installs license (#56)

2.7.1

• Port to Nuke-13 (#39)

• Fix: Paste tag from clipboard needs Nuke restart to show tagged media (#54)

• Show media in alphabetical order in tag view mode (#55)

• Fix: Sending media with white space to RV does not resolve to path (#52)

• Fix: Use multiple video files when it has a file sequence like naming (#53)

• Fix: Setting thumbnail for toolset does not process under Windows (#51)

• Upload custom thumbnail: lower file extension to check for (#50)

  This allows to upload for instance .JPG files as well as .jpg files.

2.7.0

• Add custom media commands to trigger custom code on selected media (#43)

  This update adds functionality to trigger custom commands on selected media. This gets done by registering media commands classes to smartElements that we automatically pass selected media to. How this works gets discussed in the smartElements ‘advanced’ documentation page.

2.6.2

• Disable register renderings by default (#49)

  We changed the default value to register renderings to disable it. If you want to use this feature you can enable it in the settings.

2.6.1

• Fix: Search does not contain matching elements (#47)

• Remove non matching elements in search in list view (#48)

2.6.0

• Search lists and tags (#41)

  The main window contains inputs to search for lists and tags. This is primarily useful if you have lots of lists and tags.

• Add additional stacks via environment variable (#40)

  The stacks dropdown menu gains additional paths when having the environment variable CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_ADDITIONAL_STACKS set. Similar to adding paths to the PATH and PYTHONPATH environment variable, you can specify multiple paths by concatenating them using the operating system path separator. Under Linux and MacOS this is a colon. Under Windows this is a semicolon. This feature is primarily useful for a studio in case you want your artists to have access to additional stacks without the need to add them manually per machine.

• Add functionality to rename an element (#42)

  This update adds a ‘rename’ command to the media’s right click menu to rename the selected media. Please note: This will rename the element’s name in the meta data only so that it will only be renamed in the UI. This will not rename the physical files, otherwise this would raise the risk of making media offline in case the media is already referenced in other working files.

• Fix: Clicking cancel button will still perform deletion (#44)

• Fix: Move Tag window and Info window onto the top under Linux (#45)

• Fix: Typing T into the tag window’s input closes the tag window (#46)

2.5.0

• ItemInfo widget: Update thumbnail directly without creating snapshot (#23)

2.4.0

• Speed up running in offline mode (#38)

2.3.0

• Filter elements by selected tags using an ‘any’ / ‘all’ mode (#34)

  When being in tag filtering mode, the tag list contains two radio buttons that let you choose how to view elements for the selected tags:

  • any: Show all elements that contain any of the selected tags.

  • all: Show only elements that contain all of the selected tags.

• Add remember function when asking for re-ingesting or skipping media (#35)

  When ingesting multiple media that is already contained in another list then you can check a ‘remember’ checkbox that will apply your clicked decision about ingesting or skipping to all dropped elements. The remember function works for the currently dropped elements. Then same remember mechanism applies for asking about re-ingesting media that is already contained in the currently viewed list.

• Fix: Ingesting a mov file shows frames count 1 in metadata (#29)

• Fix: Re-ingesting existing media in gallery mode hid the whole row (#37)

2.2.0

• Close tag editor when loosing focus (#32)

• Close current tag editor when opening another tag editor (#36)

• Add multiple tags at once by concatenating them with comma (#31)

• Copy tags, paste tags from one element to another (#30)

2.1.0

• Add tagging system (#20)

  You can now organize your media by using a tagging system. The element browser contains now a tagging list at the bottom left. This gives you the freedom to not depend on any sorting on your hard drives anymore - You can ingest and simply sort afterwards. An element can contain several tags and an element can occur in several tag lists. This gives you more flexibility in organizing your media if required. In order to tag elements, select one or multiple elements and press ‘T’ or choose ‘Tag’ from the context menu. In the upcoming pop up you can edit and update a media’s tags.

• Keep original aspect ratio of media previews (#21)

  When ingesting media that is not in an aspect ratio of 16/9 the preview image got distorted in previous versions. Previews get always generated in an aspect ratio of 16/9 in order to have an even layout. In case media is outside of this aspect ratio, we use a letter/pillow box for the preview. The actual media’s aspect ratio stays of course untouched.

• Restrict modifying permissions when having environment variable set (#22)

  Having the environment variable ‘CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_ALLOW_MODIFICATIONS’ set to ‘True’ or having explicitly not set this environment variable (to keep backwards compatibility; We always want all users to being able to modify data by default as all users should be responsible users) will allow all modification operations (creating lists, ingesting media, updating media, deleting media, etc.). Having this environment variable explicitly set to ‘False’ will disable any modification functionality. A studio can then decide if they want to restrict their users to be able to modify data or not.

2.0.0

• Revamp media video player (#16)

  Media videos should now play out of the box regardless the Nuke version. No additional codec installation is necessary anymore.

  Note: Revamping the media video player means a major version update because we not only refactored a lot of code, we also dropped a lot of code due to simplifying the video player widget, which created an API breaking change. The previous limitation of the used Nuke version and having an h.264 decoder and encoder installed on your machine should now not be necessary anymore.

• Add functionality to set one or multiple poster frames for media (#11)

• Add hotkeys to ItemInfo widget (#13) - F1: Toggle showing/hiding the video/static image - F2: Toggle showing/hiding the poster thumbnails - F3 or I: Toggle Insert the media into the node graph - F4 or R: Toggle Reveal the media in your explorer

• Add hotkeys to insert and reveal element (#15) - I: Insert the elements that are currently selected in the table into

  your node graph

  • R: Reveal the elements that are currently selected in the table in your file explorer

• Set media’s viewing (normal, flip, flop, flip-flop) and playback speed

  The video player’s context menu contains two new menus ‘View’ and ‘Speed’. ‘View’ lets you flip, flop and flip flop the selected media. ‘Speed’ lets you choose the playback speed of the media. When bringing the selected media into your node graph then the viewing mode and playback speed will be adjusted accordingly by creating the additional nodes Mirror and Retime.

• Optimize loading speed (#18)

1.2.0

• Add import processor to time offset media (#9)

  This update adds an additional import processor called ‘TimeOffset’. By default it is turned off. In order to enable it navigate to smartElement’s import processor settings and set TimeOffset’s enable flag from false to true.

  This import processor creates a dialog on media insertion and asks the user if they want to let the media start at a specific frame or if they want to time offset the media to a specific value. The dialog contains a ‘remember’ checkbox that will remember the entered values and apply them to all upcoming media insertions as long as smartElement’s media browser stays open.

• Fix: After render copies from non existent paths under Windows (#10)

  Due to the fact that Windows uses back slashes which Nuke does not understand, files were not copied to the correct location after the render had finished.

1.1.0

• Create import processors on importing media (#7)

  This update adds the feature to trigger custom code when importing media into the DAG. This can for example be used to copy media over to a folder that is close to the current working file to keep all used dependencies of a working file in one location. Or use it to increase a counter so that you know how many times an element has been used. There are lots and lots of scenarios where you can add custom import processors to customize imports from smartElements to your needs. For an in-depth look how this works please refer to the advanced page of our written documentation.

• Fix render whole frame range of video when ingesting a video (#8)

1.0.0

• Initial release

0.1.0

• Create Media API (#1)

• Create Job API and processors (#2)

• Create MVC (#3)

• Scan for duplicate media when ingesting (#5)

• Create documentation (#4)

• Ingest toolsets and 3D data (#6)