Classic financial advice tells us, “to save a dollar, you first have to save some cents”. The same can be said about your time. Those extra few clicks per shot might only cost you 5 seconds. Although 3 shots per day = 15 seconds per day = 1 minute, 15 seconds per week = 1 hour, 31 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Share that with your 10-person compositing team, and the results are obviously ten-fold! The numbers add up quickly, so as you can see, it pays dearly to create your own tools & save time and clicks wherever you can!
My rule of thumb is as the title says: If I do something more than twice, I know I need to template it. Templating could mean a collection of nodes that I save as a toolset (e.g. a 3D projection setup on a ground plane), or it could mean creating a gizmo to automate a particular effect (e.g. an exponential glow, made up of lots of Blur nodes).
This advice isn’t limited to Toolsets or Gizmos. It also extends to setting knob defaults via your menu.py. For example, if you find you’re always adjusting your Blur node’s value to 10, why not set that as a default, and save some manual labour!
Do you have a unique way you save time every day? Please let me know!