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VES Good Practices

Best-practice guidance drawn from the Visual Effects Society (VES) standards for file naming, crew roles, and color management. Applies to any VFX-flavored production, including the agent-orchestrated pipeline of one-small-crawl. Source of truth for naming/roles is the production’s own naming-schema + agent-production-bible; this page records the VES principles those documents build on.

File naming

Ground: VES Transfer Specifications (vestransferspec.org) plus the compatible MovieLabs / ETC VFX Image Sequence Naming v1.0 (TR-VFX-IS). OSC v1.0 (naming-schema) extends this syntax.

  • Allowed filename chars: A-Z a-z 0-9 - _ . only. Reserved/forbidden: @ # ( ). No whitespace.
  • Fields split by _, sub-fields by -; lowercase used consistently; case never distinguishes two values.
  • <= 255 chars; missing optional fields keep their underscore slot so the field order never shifts.
  • Standard image-sequence syntax: <showid>_<vfx-sequence>_<vfx-shot>_<image-type>_<vendor-code>_<revision-code> with optional -description, +camera-ref, +alternate, .<frame>.<ext>.
  • Fix the “fixed” fields early. Show ID, sequence, shot, and image type cannot change once production starts (they are set by production VFX up front). Revision / description / alternate stay tweakable. Getting the fixed fields wrong is the expensive mistake.
  • Version by revision, never by shot number. New pull or added frames -> bump _v001 to _v002. A different element (fire vs smoke) is a distinct instance, not a version; a same-content variant carries +<alternate> (+4k), and the primary best version omits the tag.
  • Vendor codes are assigned by production VFX only - never self-assigned.
  • Naming is independent of directory naming: a file keeps the same name wherever it lives; never drop filename metadata because “it’s in the folder”.
  • Standard naming lets a VFX pull from editorial deliver to any vendor with no translation and no custom ingest. Filenames are a human convenience - always mirror metadata in the file header / asset DB; never rely on parsing alone.

Role description

Ground: VES On-Set/transfer guidance on the production VFX department, and the VES Handbook role taxonomy. Roles here are VFX-department responsibilities, not the full film crew; see team for the OSC roster.

  • The production-side VFX department is the primary data custodian on a show: supervisor, producer, coordinator, on-set supervisor, data wrangler, VFX editor. They own the fixed naming fields and set vendor codes.
  • VFX supervisor - creative + technical head of the VFX effort. Spans all phases:
    • Pre-production: break the script down scene by scene, identify every VFX shot, estimate shot count / complexity / budget, create technical specs (camera requirements, on-set data-capture protocol, plate guidelines).
    • On set: supervise VFX-heavy shooting, capture lighting references (HDR chrome/gray balls, polarized HDR panoramas), place tracking markers, advise the DP so plates match planned CG.
    • Post: review dailies against approved looks, direct vendor teams through iterations, keep consistency across shots, attend color-timing/grading so VFX and live-action match, sign off deliverables.
  • VFX producer / coordinator - track shot progress, budgets, and vendor deadlines; the glue between creative and production.
  • On-set supervisor / data wrangler - guard the plates: correct camera data, lighting refs, and clean ingest on the day.
  • VFX editor - editorial interface: pulls, breakdowns, temp comps for editorial.

Color management

Ground: VES Handbook of Visual Effects (3rd ed., color management chapter by Joseph Goldstone) and the VES Cinematic Color paper (VES.04). The Handbook’s Three Guidelines:

  1. Make critical color decisions in the screening room, not an artist’s cubicle.
  2. At the desktop, use an open-source or commercial color management system if possible, but do not expect too much of it.
  3. Understand and document the color image encodings produced by the production’s cameras, renderers, film scanners, and the encodings consumed by displays, film recorders, and digital projectors.

The job of any color management system:

  • Interpret image data according to its associated color image encoding.
  • Provide a path to and from a common working space where captured image data can be combined.
  • Display original or combined data as an accurate reproduction of what the final consumer will see.

Other VES/industry color principles:

  • Golden rule of VFX: image regions with no VFX must not be modified. Color conversions applied to photography must be perfectly invertible.
  • Work in a scene-referred (scene-linear) working space; the display / output transform is applied only at the end, never baked into masters. Display transforms are for throwaway deliveries (editorial, previews) only.
  • Do no harm to the plate: delivery to the DI is the highest-fidelity representation of the original photography.
  • Standardize interchange on a well-defined encoding (ACES / OpenColorIO / ASC CDL). Round-trip test: unmodified pixels in a VFX render must match the original plate exactly for the DI.

Applied to One Small Crawl

  • Naming: naming-schema (OSC v1.0) implements the VES/ETC syntax with OSC’s origin, agent/vendor, era, and OMC version fields.
  • Roles: team maps VFX-department duties onto the human + agent crew (AGT-xxx) under the agent-production-bible.
  • Color: era-locked-look applies the VES color discipline to the five-era look - plates generated neutral (era code ntrl), era look applied in post, never baked into generation; matches VES “invertible conversions, no harm to plate.”

Notes