During Spring and Summer, a raft of updates have landed across data import, production tracking, Review and the parts of AYON that have to stay responsive as projects grow.

This roundup focuses on the changes most likely to show up in day-to-day production. That includes a much easier way to bring existing production data into AYON, significant performance work for larger projects, more automation around production status, and a Review experience that now covers much more of the feedback and approval process.

Getting production data into AYON got much easier

Setting up a project often starts with data that already exists somewhere else. It might be a hierarchy built in a spreadsheet, a list of shots exported from another production tracker, or a roster of users that would otherwise need to be recreated manually.

AYON 1.15.1 introduced CSV Import, giving teams a more practical route for bringing that information into AYON. Columns from a spreadsheet can be mapped to AYON fields, data can be pasted directly from Excel or Google Sheets without creating a separate file, and import configurations can be saved as presets for jobs that need to be repeated.

The same period brought several smaller changes that make imported and existing production data easier to work with. Lists can now be used directly from the Slicer, tasks can be grouped by their parent folders, and entire Teams such as Lighting or Compositing can be mentioned in a comment rather than tagging people individually.

For studios moving an established production into AYON, or simply setting up the next project, there's now much less reason to rebuild that structure by hand.

Bigger projects shouldn't mean slower projects

Performance has been a major focus throughout spring and summer, particularly as AYON is being used on productions with increasingly large datasets.

In June, we worked through bottlenecks exposed by real production data approaching one million versions. That resulted in a wider set of server optimisations, followed by further improvements to hierarchy browsing, real-time updates, Lists and other parts of the interface over the summer.

The latest AYON 1.16.3 release takes another substantial step on the Products page. Version loading is now up to 10x faster in large-scale environments, alongside new tools for narrowing down exactly what you need to see.

Versions can be filtered using attributes from their parent folders, including folder status, while a new Latest per Folder option makes it easier to strip a large result set back to the versions that currently matter. You can also see a version's parent folder status directly in the table and jump straight from a version to its folder or linked task.

Alongside the headline performance work, tables have continued to get better at dealing with large amounts of production information. Group rows can show counts and percentages, the Slicer can show value counts, List items can be replaced without removing and re-adding them, and the redesigned List picker can add selected work to multiple Lists at once.

Review moved further into the feedback loop

Review has changed considerably since the comparison and Playlist improvements we covered in Q1.

The first part of that work focused on making live sessions easier to run. A Laser Pointer lets participants share temporary visual feedback in real time, while the redesigned comparison workflow makes it clearer which two versions are being compared. Sorting, clip loading and sync behaviour have also continued to improve as Review has been used across larger and more varied sessions.

The bigger change came with Guest Reviews. Clients, directors and other external stakeholders can now approve a version or request changes directly from a review. Their response is recorded in the Activity Feed and can trigger notifications, so production can see who has responded without moving the decision into a separate email thread or messaging app.

Building a session has become easier too. Clips can be added to a Review session from folders, tasks or versions across AYON, while selective playback lets you pick individual clips from a longer session and temporarily review only those shots.

The latest Review 0.7.0 release expands the annotation tools again. Alongside freehand drawing, reviewers now have dedicated Arrow, Circle, Square and Line tools, with control over stroke opacity and pencil hardness. Tablet and stylus input has also been improved, and studios can display their own logo inside the Review interface.

Taken together, Review now carries much more of the process from showing the work through to getting a decision back.

Let the production data do more of the updating

Not every production status needs someone to change it by hand.

This summer, Automated Status Updates introduced rules for keeping statuses synchronised across folders, tasks and versions. A studio can, for example, configure an approved version to move its parent task forward automatically rather than relying on a producer, coordinator or artist to make the same update afterwards.

Column Summaries make the data in AYON tables more useful at a glance. Depending on the field, summaries can show counts, status breakdowns, averages or missing values, making it easier to answer practical questions such as how many tasks are still unassigned or how work is distributed across statuses.

There's also more protection for productions that need their configuration to remain stable. Project Setting Pinning can automatically create project-specific overrides when a project is created, preventing later studio-wide setting changes from unintentionally altering the setup beneath an active production.

These aren't necessarily the most visual additions we've shipped, but they're important ones. The less production depends on people remembering to copy information from one place to another, the more useful that information becomes.

A better record of what changed

As more of a production is managed in AYON, knowing the current value of an attribute is only part of the story. Sometimes you need to know how it got there.

The Activity Feed now records attribute and entity changes across folders, tasks and versions. If someone changes a priority, updates tags or modifies other production information, that change becomes part of the entity's history.

That builds on the advanced Activity Feed filtering introduced earlier in the summer, which made it easier to search large histories by text, author, date and activity type. Recent comments can also be exposed directly as table columns, so producers and supervisors can scan the latest discussion across many tasks without opening each one individually.

The result is a more useful production trail, particularly when a project has enough people and activity that simply knowing the current status doesn't tell you everything you need to know.

More to come

Spring and summer have been less about one defining feature and more about what happens when AYON meets larger, busier productions. Getting existing data into the system is easier, finding and filtering it is faster, Review carries more of the approval process, and production information can increasingly update itself rather than waiting for someone to do it manually.

There are plenty more improvements in the individual releases than we've covered here. You can follow everything we're shipping in the AYON changelog.