J.Santos Posted July 9, 2011 Share Posted July 9, 2011 Hi all! I'm trying to do a slow motion scene (or better yet, just a part of the scene). Since I really suck at animation, I thought that instead of trying to hand keyframe the animation, I could simply render it out using the increment. However, despite using values like 0.5 (or even, in despair, 0.125...) and the render being happily churning out x amount of frames more then it should, the reality is that when I import them back to Mplay (or even Nuke...), I don't get any time change AND (this is the odd part...), I have the same number of frames and size of file as if I was rendering normally... Any idea about this? And to solve this... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anim Posted July 9, 2011 Share Posted July 9, 2011 the key is to name them accordingly you cannot use just $F in filename since the floating point files will be overwritten , but using $FF or $N should work correctly Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Santos Posted July 9, 2011 Author Share Posted July 9, 2011 Hi anim! Thanks for the quick reply! Just tested what you said and I add just this... use the $N and not $FF. The reason is that $N will create frame 1, frame 2,..., frame 200 and $FF will create frame 1, frame 1.25, frame 5... until frame 200. The problem? When you want to import them as sequence, Mplayer will divide them in a bunch of "sequences", the one with integer numbers, the 0.25 one, the 0.5 and so on... so you end up with something that might be used if you rename them or something. So... extra steps! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anim Posted July 9, 2011 Share Posted July 9, 2011 it depends on your needs, since in houdini and nuke you can define what frame to import so you can use $FF in import path or anything you want I have used formatted $FF many times and it was better for me because every time I look at sequence I immediately know that 1.125 is subframe between 1 and 2 , but if you use $N you don't know what 10 means, but $N can be useful for simple cases or for systems that cannot handle floating point frames some nodes like File COP can detect subframes automatically Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Santos Posted July 9, 2011 Author Share Posted July 9, 2011 Well... for ease on the brain, I'll go with the $N now... The thing I was facing when trying to open the files after $FF was multiple sequences... My original sequence was from 130 to 200, rendered with 0.25 increment. So I ended with a sequence from 130-200, and then several sub-sequences like -> 3ndTestWithSpeed.175.$F.tiff (5-75 by 50); 3ndTestWithSpeed.176.$F.tiff (5-75 by 20) and so on... Since I don't know how to import this (I didn't tried in Nuke... just Mplay) I opted to test out the $N and it worked... I would like to understand this because it might be useful to know what is the exact value of frame 10, like you say but for now I had to move along... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anim Posted July 9, 2011 Share Posted July 9, 2011 sequences with floating point frames cannot be viewed in mplay right now, but I guess mplay is not the target application there is nothing wrong with using $N especially if you were slowing down time and you are ok with it, it's made for that purpose but if you are caching geometry sequences and you need substeps, then $FF is the right choice, you don't need to use raw $FF , you can format it as you wish through hscript or python to make it more pleasant like `padzero(4,$F)+"."+padzero(4,10000*frac($FF))` will give you frame in format like XXXX.YYYY where X is int frame and Y subframe part both consist of 4 figures 1.5 -> 0001.5000 432.725 -> 0432.7250 the same can be used for reading the files or you can use completely different logic for reading those files 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Santos Posted July 10, 2011 Author Share Posted July 10, 2011 sequences with floating point frames cannot be viewed in mplay right now, but I guess mplay is not the target application there is nothing wrong with using $N especially if you were slowing down time and you are ok with it, it's made for that purpose but if you are caching geometry sequences and you need substeps, then $FF is the right choice, you don't need to use raw $FF , you can format it as you wish through hscript or python to make it more pleasant like `padzero(4,$F)+"."+padzero(4,10000*frac($FF))` will give you frame in format like XXXX.YYYY where X is int frame and Y subframe part both consist of 4 figures 1.5 -> 0001.5000 432.725 -> 0432.7250 the same can be used for reading the files or you can use completely different logic for reading those files Thank you anim for the explanation. It is something that I know sooner or later will be handy. However, like you said and you're completely correct, at the moment I couldn't waste more time with it, so $N is making a super job It's odd that Mplay cannot view in-between frames... of course it is not the target application, but it seems weird that you need to open other app just to make sure that what you rendered is correct... or import it back through a File COP node... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.