Who is Bernard?
Bernard (Bernard Production Engine) is the production engine for animation and VFX studios. The whole team, from production to artists, follows and moves forward the same shots, tasks and files, live, in a desktop application connected to content creation software.
This guide describes version 2.1.48.
A character
Bernard is also a character. He has his own ideas about production:
« The key is located in the graph workflow structure, not in the states multiplicity. » — Bernard Brainstorming, 2015/03/21
In other words: the strength of production tracking lies in the structure of its workflows, not in the number of its states. Bernard keeps few task states (Waiting, Ready, WIP, Pause, Done, Aborted, Failed) and does the rest with the task graph.
What Bernard does
- Track production: project tree, spreadsheet, Spreadsheet Multi, Property panel.
- Organise work: task workflows in the node view, templates that propagate, assignment by department and by role.
- Manage files: paths computed by expressions, versions, copies between sites.
- Review and annotate: notes, corrections, instructions, playlists, review in Bernard Review.
- Count time: time spent and attendance computed by the server, planning and workload.
- Notify: notifications in Bernard and by e-mail.
- Integrate: plugins for Maya, Nuke, Blender, Houdini, 3DEqualizer, 3ds Max, After Effects, Animate and TVPaint, and a Python API for the studio's scripts.
Platforms
- The desktop application runs on Windows (with an installer), macOS and Linux.
- It also runs in a Citrix environment and in remote desktop.
- Workstations synchronise through a hosted Bernard service. Production files stay with the studio: on its disks, its shares or its SFTP server.
- Bernard Review, the review player, is installed with Bernard.
Who makes it
Bernard is designed and published by AArts Lab SAS, in Salon-de-Provence (France).
- Website: www.bernardengine.com
- Support: support@bernardengine.com
- Python API reference: bernardengineapi.readthedocs.io
In the application, Bernard › About Bernard shows the installed version and the team.