Collapse Image Sequences
When working with Film VFX, everything we render will be outputted as image sequence. VFX softwares can collapse images that has the same name but different padding. Like this: image.0001.exr image.0002.exr image.0003.exr image.0004.exr image.0005.exr image.0006.exr image.0007.exr image.0008.exr. In a collapsed view it looks like this: image.1-8@@@@.exr where @ or # signs represents how many padded numbers the files have. When you select the collapse file, all 8 files gets selected. I'm looking for this feature in a file browser but haven't found it yet.
anonymous
shared this idea
9 comments
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frank rueter
commented
I have longed for a file browser that does just this for ages. I would absolutely love to see it implemented in PF!!!
Please consider, it would make it absolutely unique (especially if it can identify broken file sequences to quickly identify missing frames). -
Yash Gupta
commented
Coming from the animation field, I would definitely vote for this!
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BjornF
commented
Yes, at my facility we are looking into getting path finder for our macs and this could be the single most useful feature if it were to be implemented.
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Br1
commented
Bumping this discussion. I'm handling thousands of picture files in the directories of the movies I' m working on and viewing them all as one entry per sequence would be such a timesaver
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Hermo commented
Image sequence collapsing would be very welcome indeed. When looking at folders with tens of thousands of frames the sheer amount of rows in the listing causes hiccups for both Finder and PF.
Gap detection would also be a huge time saver, currently we use a shell/awk script to find gaps and break sequences which is painful and scares away GUI dependent artists :)
It would also be cool if PF didn't stat() every frame in the sequence unless told to do so as it can take a long time, especially when working over a samba connection.
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Eric Ohman
commented
Where I work, this feature would be the #1 reason for using Path Finder instead of Finder.
I agree with mlesin, it's very important to treat gaps the way he described. -
kent
commented
I agree, this would be nice as a view mode option to simplify things, but there's no need to add a symbol for the padding. The number sequence is what it is and there's no need to confuse the view. If a sequence numbering has a padding of three it looks like this: FileName.001-100.ext, if it has no padding it looks like this: FileName.1-100.ext. Simple. No need for anything else.
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mlesin
commented
Please note that sequences may be padded and may be not;
image.8.jpg image.9.jpg image.10.jpg should look as a single sequence
image.#(8-10).jpg
A sequence with gaps inside would be nice to be seen as different rows, like this:
image.####(1-58).jpg
image.####(70-99).jpg -
Tiago Silva
commented
Please, please, please. Professional systems like Baselight have utilities like FLux to do this (and they copy-in-sequence, for example), but having the possibility of browsing collapsed file-sequences would mean a lot (the Mac version of FLux only comes with the Mac version of Baselight, more than USD20 000).
