Customizable UI for review upload codec

[manneohrstrom]

We discussed the fact that the list of “output modules” / codecs in AE is usually heavily customized. The list of built-in ones is limited. Studios add their own. Right now, the publish integration has the codec configured as a config setting for the publish plugin. This is a point where most studios are likely to need to customize. We discussed the option to – in addition to customize it in the config – also be able to put it in via the publish UI as a custom publish UI dropdown. This UI could also contain some info around which codec formats are suitable when uploading for review in Shotgun.

[manneohrstrom]

More details:

• Have a dropdown in the publish UI showing available codecs
• Ability to specify which codec is the default one in the config
• Ability in the config to disable the user selecting a codec
• A user selected dropdown setting to persist across sessions (e.g. using qsettings tk framework). Setting should be per engine (e.g. SCOPE_ENGINE) - meaning that the setting persists and is always the same.

[martinminsel]

Hi @robblau ,

@mathurf and me found the following issues, that should also be addressed by this ticket:

Currently a couple of validations, that are not possible if the copy, render and publish tasks are different publish plugins:

1. If the render-queue-item is UNRENDERED then we need to check, whether the render task is checked as well!
2. If the render-queue-item is UNRENDERED and the copy task is unselected in tk-config-default2, then the publish validation should fail
   So I think we have to combine the 3 publish plugins (render, copy, publish) into one, instead only combining copy and publish. This would also mean to change the validations a bit.

Additionally we found out in QA, that one may select the configured output-module ("Lossless with Alpha") in After Effects.
If one now changes settings of this output-module, the UI-name changes to "Custom: Lossless with Alpha", while in javascript the name is not switched (still being "Lossless with Alpha").
This situation results in the fact that we cannot guarantee, that the given output-module results in the right render output.
So checking if the settings have been changed is crucial.
This may be even a separate ticket, but I would propose to start an investigation task on this to see, how we can actually check these settings, as we cannot access the output-module-settings directly from Javascript.

I hope this makes sense to you.
Cheers,
Martin