I was in Toronto this week, and I got a chance to have dinner with a bunch of guys - some old friends, some new - with several decades of experience in animation film and TV, between us. We spent a couple rounds of drinks regaling one another with horror stories about productions gone wrong: why does it seem like everybody makes the same mistakes, trying to set up a pipeline? Part of it seems to be the relative immaturity of the industry - it just hasn't been around long enough - nor does it stay still long enough - for "best practices" and standards to emerge. In some ways, this is a good thing - there's a lot of competitive advantage to be had in pipeline, and companies that "coast" are going to find their work outsourced to someone better/faster/cheaper. But for all of it's importance, building pipelines doesn't seem to get the same attention as other aspects of the industry - aside from one or two "Birds of a Feather" meetings at SIGGRAPH, there are virtually no discussion groups, or papers or panels or even online discussion groups, dedicated to the art and science of building production pipelines. Larger studios usually have a pipeline architect (qualified or not!), but smaller studios often relegate it to "the tech guy" - maybe an artist who does some scripting, too, or the IT guy who maintains the email and DNS servers. Worse yet is the studio who gets a consultant - one that hasn't actually worked on a production, no less - to come in and really screw things up; I'm in the middle of fixing one of those, now...