Set priorities

Set priorities - Exercise

What are priorities

To prioritize the scheduling of certain activities, you can set a priority number in Flow Generative Scheduling.

All activities can have priorities.

Priority is an arbitrary number, relative to the other numbers you select. For example, an activity with a priority of 100 will be prioritized above an activity with a priority of 35.

Priority goes from -1000 to +1000, to give you plenty of priority numbers to play with. By default, all activities start with a priority of 0.

How to apply priorities

To easily apply a priority:

1. Open the Schedule tab.
2. Select an activity.
3. Open the Controls tab.
4. Enter a number into the Priority value field.

Remove priorities by selecting the X in the Priority value field.

Priority will apply to an entire hierarchy. For example, all the tasks within a sequence will inherit the sequence priority. In the example below, the CRA sequence has a priority of 150. All of the shots within the sequence have inherited the same priority.

Within the sequence, priority can be changed on individual shots to prioritize certain shots over others. In this same example, the shots in the CRA sequence will be prioritized over the shots of other sequences with a lower priority, while CRA_0002 will be prioritized over the other shots in the CRA sequence.

Priorities versus constraints

Priority is used to describe the relative importance of different parts of your schedule.

Priority can be seen as a soft objective, as opposed to constraints or dependencies, which are more strictly enforced.

For example, you may be working on a film project with sequences and shots. Your client would like to see progress on certain key shots first.

While you may want to prioritize that certain shots are worked on before others, there is no specific time-based constraints or any dependency between the sequences. In this case, you could set these more important shots to have a higher priority than the others. In this example, a priority of 100 has been added to 3 shots, while others maintain a priority of 0.

If there is a hard requirement that something should be done in a specific order or in a specific time frame, you can add constraints.

For example, instead of wanting to simply see progress on those key shots first, your client is putting together a trailer and needs work on those shots to be completed by a certain date. In this scenario, a Finish no later than constraint has been added to three shots.