yes the external mattes from VFX and animation are gold, so it would be great to have better flagging/access. +1 for sure.
Might be nice to be able to view the multi channels of an EXR quickly in some sort of contact sheet or "lightbox" sort of view that splits them out into thumbnails so you can quickly get a look at not only what exists, but if it's good/usable or not. We use this all the time in Nuke (the "layer contact sheet") for multipass CG, but it's perfect for embedded mattes. And it's nice (in Nuke) that the contact sheet is customizable in terms of how many rows/columns and what resolution you want to view the grid. I would LOVE to see an interface like this replace the current way of adding an embedded matte to a node, which is just a right click and text.
It would probably be possible to scan a directory full of VFX shots and output what channels are in each EXR, maybe using Fusion/Nuke/RV for this and then pushing the output to a text file. Or a visual way of doing it would be scripting a batch render of little QC quicktimes of this contact sheet idea that you could pull up and refer to, showing all the channels in each shot.
With the text file, you'd be at the mercy of if the vendor named the channels correctly or even if it was something human readable, and not just generic "matte1" "matte2"
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