Hasta La Motion!

Here’s the issue:

Currently the sup sets up the various writeout settings for the show and the artist imports that script into theirs and just attaches it to the end. The problem is if there are any changes to that writeout portion, the artists are responsible for updating any scripts that need to be rerendered with the new writeout nodes. If they go back a couple versions chances are that eariler version doesn’t have the latest writeout nodes and they often forget to update it, ets.

I’d like to have a centrally located writeout script that is called at the time of rendering (assuming they render using a custom render command rather than interactive). If the sup updates it then all work, even past scripts, would automatically get the changes, no extra effort on the part of the artists.

It seems like the way to go is to treat the artists scripts like a precomp with an output node at the bottom (below a precomp write node) and to then have a precomp node at the top of the writeout script tree. The custom render command would actually fire off the Writeout script and environment variables and runtime arguments would tell it what shot and script to reference. The issue is that the precomp node doesn’t appear to like environment variables or commandline passed arguments. It only works with a hard code line.

My question is, is there either a) anyway around this to be able to feed the File field of the precomp node variables at run time, or b) a better way to acomplish what I want to do, i.e., have a centrally called Writeout script?

Thanks for any help you guys might be able to give me,

Dan