I have a sequence of images ( a mask of let’s say, 5 images ) that is to be played from the 6th frame till the 10th ( and they’re all numbered properly ). Till the 6th frame is reached, the first image of the mask must be played and after the 10th frame, the 5th image must be played till the final frame of the playback.
Is there a way of doing this? I’m using the Image node in the compositor and it’s very confusing!
I’ve a feeling that the my question is very simple but I quite can’t figure out the answer
You might not be doing anything wrong. I suspect there was an intermittent bug in blender 2.71 with the image offset handling, but I never could get it to repeat consistently to report it. My workaround for a dynamic paint simulation was to create one image for every frame and load them all. Here’s the strange part. The dynamic paint canvas would load 1008 images and render them on GPU, but the very next scene that I made had 200 image textures and so I bumped into the 145 GPU texture limit. 55 objects rendered purple. I love blender, but nearly every project has a puzzle like this to solve.
I’m using blender 2.69. And I’m not getting anything directly off the renderer. I’ve had all the images rendered and saved, along with the mask (which I made by hand), in separate directories.
You said something about “image offset handling” being wrong. Maybe that’s my key? The one I need to solve the issue at hand? How do I get to do that?
Here’s one partial solution I came up with. If I saved a .blend file on, say, frame 300, but my image sequence was supposed to start on frame 250, then when I reopened the file the image texture would never load. Sometimes, and I must stress “sometimes” because this was an intermittent problem and fix, I could get the images to load by returning all the way to the first frame and then “playing” the file up to the desired frame and it would then load the image texture. Same thing sometimes would happen with animation keyframes.
If every frame is already rendered and you are just working in the Video Sequencer, then simply adding the image strip to the desired frame should work. To get the first frame to play on earlier frames, click the left handle of the strip, press G-Key and “grab” the handle to the left. Then select the right handle of the strip and repeat towards the right.
Have you “Refreshed Sequencer?” You aren’t using proxies are you?
Handling the frames of sequences in compositor is really hard to grasp. The logic behind it is sooooo unlogical that I always get stuck when it comes to situations like yours.
Please don’t ask me why the settings I’m about to show you work, but they do.
Let’s say you have such sequence:
So we have a total of 12 images starting from 5 and ending at 16.
Here are the settings that work:
Frames: 11 (one less than number of images. For some reason we take end frame minus start frame: 16-5=11)
Start Frame: 6 (even though we should start the sequence at 5, we for some reason have to set it to start frame plus one: 5+1=6)
Offset: 5 (Here for some reason we enter the number of the first frame, i.e. 5)
If anyone sees any logic in this, please tell me… I don’t. Anyway… the setup above works. When you have scene frames set to: 1 to 100 then your sequence will play frame 5 from frame 1 to 5, then 6 at 6, 7 at 7 and so on until frame 16 and then frame 16 will be played till the end.
I also notice that you can start the vse at frame zero but it renders from frame 1. Perhaps Blender counts frames from the back of the frame intend of the start?
One of the last things I’d stumbled upon when I was tinkering with the sequence editor before I’d turned in for the day was your exact method. It didn’t make any sense to me so I’d thought I’d figure it out later today. And then I see your post stating the very thing and that you too didn’t see the logic behind it, haha.
Oh, blender…!
So from this method, the only variable is the Start Frame. As in the frame when the images start “progressing”.
