VES Transfer Specifications

Visual Effects production requires a constant exchange of image sequence data between the VFX houses and the studios including full resolution uncompressed source or final plates and compressed files for the editorial department.

The VES Transfer Specifications document provides a reference template that can be used to effectively define how Visual Effects vendors should ingest, process and deliver image data for visual effects production.

Based on the feedback of multiple VFX vendors involved with hundreds of productions, VES Transfer Specs have been introduced with the following goals:

• Provide a standard reference on which information VFX vendors require for visual effects production

• Suggest a common nomenclature

• Suggest best practices on how specifications should be provided and when

• Clearly identify specifications that cannot be easily changed once vfx production has started from information that is less critical and can be easily tweaked at a later stage

• Suggest best practices for certain aspects of the delivery process

Using these templates benefits both production teams and VFX vendors reducing the number of iterations required to establish the production pipeline for each show.

The VFX Transfer Specs package includes two documents:

• VFX Transfer Specs Guide Google Doc. Introducing the different aspects of the specification. Also available for download in Word format.

• VFX Transfer Specs Sample. A complete example based on a recent production. Also available for download in Word format.

Templates are provided as Word documents and Google Docs in order to be aligned with existing working practices and for easy extensibility. The initial focus is more on capturing all required specifications rather than on automating ingestion of this data, but future iterations of this project may focus on a more formal standardization to enable automation.