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Live Review in RV (Beta)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Live Review makes it easy for you to create a shared review session that others can join via an invite link. All you need is the latest RV with Live Review and an active connection to the same Flow Production Tracking site.

Get started with Live Review by opening the Live Review panel either via the double arrows in the bottom toolbar, or by selecting Live Review > Toggle Panel from the menu.

Creating a session

Create a new session by selecting Create Session in the Live Review panel, or use the menu action Live Review > Create Session.

Create session mini tutorial Figure 1: Open Live Review panel and create a new session. Image courtesy of: © Blender Foundation

You will immediately join this session as the presenter. Your player state will be shared with everyone else, giving only you control over playback, annotations and more.

To invite others to join you, use the Copy Link button at the bottom of the panel. This will copy a link that you can share with others via work chat or email. Alternatively, you can share the session ID displayed at the bottom of the panel.

Note:

Avoid using session IDs as the invite method if your participants commonly use multiple Flow Production Tracking sites, as they may join an empty session on the wrong site by accident.

Scheduling sessions in advance

Live Review has no explicit scheduling features, but session IDs can be re-used as many times as you want. For example, for recurring review meetings with your team.

Simply create a session and copy the invite link. The session and link will remain valid, even if you leave the session. Include the link in any email or calendar invite with the time of your choosing. The session will be (re)created every time someone joins with the session link.

Persistence

Live Review synchronizes all connected users during an active session, but does not store any information about media, playback state or annotations after the last user leaves.

If you want to curate the media for a review session ahead of time—for example for a scheduled review meeting—assemble the media and save the RV session via File > Save Session in the menu. At the time of the review meeting, join the Live Review session and open your pre-assembled media via File > Open….

Joining a session

When someone shares a Live Review link with you, selecting it will launch RV and you will join the session automatically. If you have been given a Live Review session ID, open the Live Review panel and enter it into the the session ID field and select "Join".

If you can't join a session, or can't see the media being shared, check the access requirements.

Note:

You must be logged into the same Flow Production Tracking site the session was created on. If you want to invite someone outside your studio, ensure they have an appropriate user account and permissions to access the media you intend to share with them.

Leaving a session

A session will remain available until the last participant leaves. If you are the current presenter, we recommend you promote someone else to be presenter before you leave, otherwise a participant will be chosen automatically.

In case you accidentally leave the session by closing the RV window, or through a crash, you can simply re-join the session.

Using Live Review

Presenter role

One person in a Live Review session is the designated presenter. All other participants will see the media the presenter has loaded in their RV and the presenter is the only person that can control playback and other viewing aspects like zoom, pan, as well as annotations.

To change who is presenting, hover over a participant's name in the Live Review panel and select Make Presenter. Anyone in the session can make themselves presenter, or give the presenter role to others.

Flow Production Tracking Notes and annotations

Using Screening Room details panel with Live Review Figure 2: Using Screening Room details panel with Live Review.

When reviewing media that is tracked in Flow Production Tracking, the Screening Room for RV details panel can be used to view or add notes and annotations to media being reviewed. Toggle this panel via the Flow Production Tracking > View > Details Pane menu.

Service access

Security

The Live Review service synchronizes the player states of all participants, but never transfers media itself. All data exchanged between players is end-to-end encrypted. This means sensitive data, such as file names, are protected from being accessed by anyone not participating in the session, which includes Flow Production Tracking.

During a Live Review session, you can see the status of the connection encryption via the security indicator at the bottom of panel.

Media access

All participants, not just the presenter, in a Live Review session must have have access to the media being shared. If the media being viewed is stored in Flow Production Tracking, all participants must have the right permissions to view the media. If the media is served via network storage or similar, every participant's machine must have independent access to this media (e.g. be on studio VPN, have the correct network share mounted, etc.).

Note:

Media that is only available on your local machine, such as your desktop, can currently not be shared via Live Review.

Note:

When playing back Versions from Flow Production Tracking, every participant needs to be able to access the exact media representation being used. If the presenter is looking at an image sequence referenced by the path_to_frames field on Version, participants who cannot access the file path on network storage will not be able to see any media, even if they have access to other representations, such as the encoded web media.

Flow Production Tracking access

Live Review in RV is authenticated via Flow Production Tracking. Anyone wanting to create or join a session must be logged into the same Flow Production Tracking site. To check what Flow Production Tracking site you are currently authenticated with, See the Flow Production Tracking > Flow Production Tracking Connection Details menu.

When using an invite link, you can see the Flow Production Tracking site name in the link itself, e.g. your-studio.shotgridstudio.com/live/GEJ4M0.

Live Review service access

Each participant's machine needs the ability to access https://live-collab.ems.autodesk.com on port 443 to use Live Review in RV. Depending on your network setup, this service URL and port may need to be allow-listed by your network administrator. The current service status of the Live Review service can be checked on the Flow Production Tracking status page.

Note:

Currently, Live Review is exclusively available for hosted Flow Production Tracking sites.

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