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Fluxx

Pipeline Architecture

Retired 2026-09-24 (ledger A12, the second pass). This page described five primitives, a vault, a split compute layer and two finishing tracks under names since retired; its prior body is kept whole at 02_Working/Archive/Wiki_pre_second_pass_2026_09/technology/pipeline-architecture.md. What follows is the architecture as decided in September 2026, from 02_Working/CLI_Briefs/THE_FRAME.md, THE_ANSWER.md, THE_ANSWER_2.md, THE_ANSWER_3.md, THE_ANSWER_4.md, Collector_Spec/COLLECTOR_SPEC.md, System/SYSTEM_MAP.md and 02_Working/Strategy/Company_Overview/FLUXX_DESCRIPTION_2026_09.md. Prices live in Wireless_Router_Pricing/PRICE_LIST.md and travel nowhere from here.

What is built

One automated pipeline, from the moment a take is captured through to a finished, integrated render. Capture: the plate plus everything needed to reconstruct the shot, camera pose, lens, timing and the state of every source. Pairing: the take matched to its staged CG scene by the production’s own identifier. Lighting: passes scripted, not hand-set per shot. Render: a full Nuke render with everything it needs, including mattes, so the lighting is integrated into the plate rather than delivered as separate elements. That whole chain is the product.

Three things are being built:

  • The collector, the unit on the cart. It listens to every device on the set, keeps one complete record per take with a verdict on whether the data can be trusted, writes the temporary footage, and serves the truck panel. Specified requirement by requirement in COLLECTOR_SPEC.md, R-1 to R-92, with its build order set. Built by Fluxx.
  • Fluxx Automate, the engine that runs the second half of the chain: a browser-based visual graph that is both the design of the pipeline and the thing executing it. A hub on the stage and a hub in the studio talk to service agents on the storage and render machines and to bridge services that launch and supervise the animation and compositing applications from outside them. Running code today; the plan points it at the record.
  • The stage manager’s day view, what the floor sees of the day’s plan against what has actually been shot.

Automation is agentic wherever the data allows it and honest about where it does not: pairing, rendering, checking a render and restarting a failed job from the last good frame are each handed to an agent, and people look at what the agent flags. No human gate on the production path, by decision.

The stack, as it stands

As of Kevin’s calls of 2026-09-14 and 2026-09-16, and the two-camera correction of 2026-09-20. Mo-Sys StarTracker Max with Z/F/I encoders and the Mo-Sys lens file as the primary pose and lens, reporting in the surveyed stage datum. VIVE Mars CamTrack as the verifier only, registered to the datum every morning by the floor test. Rig encoders as a third FreeD source on a rig shot. One Ambient Lockit+ as Fluxx’s genlock, jammed to production sound’s timecode. The collector on a Mac Studio with the AJA KONA 5 in an Io Xpand chassis over Thunderbolt, writing the record and, through Apple’s own encoder, a ProRes plate for every take; the bench must prove the Mac as host or the host is a tower. A Netgear M4250 switch with four VLANs, an AJA KUMO router, a multiviewer, a UPS, a cart. QTake Pro on its own Mac Studio with an Io 4K Plus per camera, the safety and the reference record, checked against, never depended on. A Teradek Bolt off a router output for village; the collector’s feed cabled, always. A TrueNAS NAS on 10 GbE with the watcher on it keyed on the manifest rename; Automate’s database an index that is never the truth; one hub on the stage, one in the studio, the cloud as the studio’s farm. The floor postvis on the stage render node in minutes; a 2K postvis and the deliverable in the cloud per selected take. UDP multicast with OpenTrackIO as the wire format, every vendor’s native bytes beside it, per-take JSONL at full precision, camera.usd in centimetres and lens.nk out to Nuke, never FBX. Two cameras, not three; camera 3 lines are a priced option.

Out: no hub product, no PTP, no 2110, no Evertz, no stYpe, no ZEISS, no OptiTrack for camera, no DCS, no LockitModule, no VisionMax, no Grid as infrastructure, no Corvid, no Videohub, no Ranger, no Mars Studio Edition, no HyperDeck, no tower unless the bench says so.

The rules the architecture keeps

The product is not built around another product. Files are truth, databases are views. The kit follows the job’s frame rate. A default is not a value; the identifier hierarchy is production-defined, bound at setup, locked. The wall is a lighting instrument, not a render target, so frame-accurate frustum and sub-frame determinism are not requirements. Precision is set by the re-render, latency by the live view. Selection has several sources and the edit is the authority once it exists; the cart never selects. Judge elements, not badges; buy before build.

The two filings

Two US provisional applications were filed on 1 April 2026: one on Automate’s out-of-process supervision, anomaly detection and machine-learning-assisted recovery, one on the wall method behind ComposiTrack (the filing’s working name is ChromaTrack; ComposiTrack is the canonical name everywhere else, Q-G88). Both are described as filed, with no ownership claim, until counsel confirms the assignment wording. See the description §5.

Open on the critical path

BT-2 extended, the Mac as the collector host, one bench day; BT-4, the render deadline on the bench at quarter resolution; BT-3, camera.usd into Maya and Nuke; BT-5, the watcher; the vendor answers on the QTake XML specification, the Mo-Sys quote and accuracy, the Io Xpand at two 12G streams. The full list is in SESSION_BRIEF.md and REVIEW_QUEUE.md.

Cross-references

  • Capture to Delivery Workflow
  • Cloud-Side Operations
  • 02_Working/CLI_Briefs/System/SYSTEM_MAP.md and SYSTEM_BRIEF.md, research-grade
  • 02_Working/CLI_Briefs/System/DEVELOPMENT_PLAN.md, five phases, each ending in a demonstration
  • 04_Fluxx_Shared/00_Canon/Q-G/Q-G3_ComposiTrack_SubFrame_Architecture.md, Q-G38_ComposiTrack_IP.md, Q-G49_Compute_Architecture.md, Q-G80_Fluxx_Automate_Orchestration_Module.md, Q-G88_ComposiTrack_Canonical_Name.md

Audience visibility

industry, investor, vendor, counsel.