Using Slater Addon

Last updated About 2 months ago

Overview

AYON Slater addon streamlines your review workflow by automating the creation of professional slates. It seamlessly generates and embeds fully customizable slates directly into your video outputs, drawing all necessary metadata from your production data using reusable, configurable templates.

Using the Slater Addon

To use the addon, you must first add a Slate in the settings:

  • Specify Filters: Define the conditions for when this slate template should be used, such as the application (host) name and the product types.

  • Add Slates: Within the profile, you can add multiple slate configurations:

    • Set Slate Name: Give your slate configuration a unique name.

    • Select Slate Template: Choose a Slate Template. The addon is shipped with a default template, but you can create custom templates using the Slate Editor.

  • If you would like to create multiple slates, add a new slate entry to the Slates list.

Crucial Step: Ensure you have added the slate-frame tag to the correct Extract Review Output Definitions profile to enable the slate generation in your review output.

Slater Addon Settings

Fonts

Setting Location: ayon+settings://slater/fonts

The Slate Extractor will look for fonts in these specified paths if the font is not already installed on the system.

  • Font name: The name used to reference the font (e.g., "Arial").

  • Font path: The path to the font file. This path can be rootless, such as using the expression {root[work]}.

Extract Slates

Setting Location: ayon+settings://slater/publish/ExtractGeneratedSlates

The Extract Slates plugin allows you to create a list of profiles, where each profile includes:

  • Host names: Specifies the hosts (software or environment) for which the profile applies.

  • Product Types: Specifies the product types for which the profile applies.

  • Product names: Specifies a regex pattern for the product names for which the profile applies.

  • Keep source representation: When enabled, the source representation will not be removed, resulting in two representations: one with slates and one without.

  • Slates: A list where you can specify multiple slates. Each slate entry includes:

  • Slate name: The given name for your slate.

  • Template name: The name of the slate JSON template.

    Slate JSON templates can be created and uploaded to the server via the Slate Editor

  • Additional Filtering

    • Families: Filters based on publish families.

      Publish families are complex and rely on knowledge of the codebase.

  • Studio logo (path): The absolute logo path you want to use as the studio logo. This includes a separate path definition per OS.

Slater Admin Notes

Slater CLI

This section, intended for TDs, outlines how to access the addon from the command-line interface (CLI) using the AYON executable. For additional information, refer to Launcher - Admin Notes.

The Slater Addon provides the following CLI commands:

Example
cd <ayon-launcher-installation-location>
./ayon_console.exe addon slater <command> [OPTIONS]

launch

Launch Slate Editor UI.

Example
cd <ayon-launcher-installation-location>
./ayon_console.exe addon slater --project <project_name> --entity-type <project/folder/task> --entity-id <entity_id>

Option

Description

--project <TEXT>

The project name.

--entity_type <TEXT>

Entity type (project, folder, task)

--entity_id <TEXT>

Entity ID (folder or task ID)