Blackmagic Forum

Recently Independent Technology Centre and MovieLabs released
"VFX Image Sequence Naming recommendations"
Found at the link below
https://drive.google.com/file/d/173MM9V ... 2o5SN/view

Resolve may wish to adopt some of the ideas in this paper.
Just wanted to bring it to your attention.


James

I like A091_composting_new version.better-final 1.jpg kind of sequences more, keeps you sharp and on the edge all the time. If in trouble, hire some poor bugger as assistant for "exposure" to sort it out.

No doubt helpful for the industry as a whole but I'm guessing that outside of the post of large productions, it will be the VFX houses that will be applying these naming conventions to the work materials as they are delivered to them.

Jokes aside, Resolve should first adopt the concept of "shot", before anything meaningful can be added.

What's that mean, Hendrik?

Jim Simon wrote:What's that mean, Hendrik?

That means that if you have a specific cut item, it can have unique metadata like shot name etc, and it can be automatically (not manually one by one) exported with specific naming convention that includes shot specific variables (shot name, version etc). Currently Resolve had no cut item specific metadata afaik, it is all related to source clip, which can be same for multiple unique shots.

If this can be done somehow currently, I'm all ears. Lets say I have a camera file cut into 10 pieces on timeline. Each piece is a new shot with unique name. How can I:
- automatically generate/change or simply relate shot names to these cut items?
- how can I automatically (not manually one by one) export these cut items to, lets say exr sequences, so that each sequence has name format {shot}_plate_####.exr and lands in folder named .../{shot}/plate/ and has frame numbers set by some specific logic (from source tc or starting from 1001 etc).

10 shots is obviously small number. But lets say I have 1000 shots.

I'm a little confused.

Normally, one clip is one shot.

Jim Simon wrote:I'm a little confused.

Normally, one clip is one shot.

Until it isn't. If you cut a dialogue, one source clip can easily turn into ten different shots. But how shots origin is not the question, there can be many reasons. Question is how do you handle them in Resolve.

As a work around I usually add the timeline index or record timecode for each cut.
But of course it would be great to have it as an individual item.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

iddos-l wrote:As a work around I usually add the timeline index or record timecode for each cut.

Problem is that it is very far from most shot naming conventions, so doesn't really do anything besides getting a sequence with wrong name written automatically to some wrong folder.

Hendrik Proosa wrote:

iddos-l wrote:As a work around I usually add the timeline index or record timecode for each cut.

Problem is that it is very far from most shot naming conventions, so doesn't really do anything besides getting a sequence with wrong name written automatically to some wrong folder.

I've been using range markers in the timeline wit the VFX squence and shot names and numbers according to conventional schemes but that just allows edit index lists for export but I think your idea of adding metadata to shots would be much better.

The other issue with indexes is that they change as additional cuts, inserts are made to the edit. Would be great to have an option so the indexes would sub group on edit (10 becomes 10.1, 10.2...) with an option to recalc back to a whole number sequence. I would also like to be able to jump to a clip number by typing in the index whilst on a timeline.

Kel Philm wrote:The other issue with indexes is that they change as additional cuts, inserts are made to the edit. Would be great to have an option so the indexes would sub group on edit (10 becomes 10.1, 10.2...) with an option to recalc back to a whole number sequence. I would also like to be able to jump to a clip number by typing in the index whilst on a timeline.

Excellent ideas.
One the best features of assimilate is the slot number indexing which you can type and jump to.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

At ILM and Cinesite, we always found room for the date in the file name, which at least gave the color conforming artist the info on whether it was today's shot or last week's shot or a shot from a month ago. ILM was big on having VFX file names that were like 200 characters long, just incredible.

Marc Wielage wrote:At ILM and Cinesite, we always found room for the date in the file name, which at least gave the color conforming artist the info on whether it was today's shot or last week's shot or a shot from a month ago. ILM was big on having VFX file names that were like 200 characters long, just incredible.

and for what I know, at ILM, every shot ever produced has a unique number in it that is the progressive number of shots ever done since the inception of that method, in that way , it's unique...

Shot is also unique with combination of show code, sequence code and shot code. And old-new relation can be conveyed with version token.

Imho date in file name makes sense only when that file is always manually handled, can not be logically versioned up (due to frequent length changes etc) and when creation date is actually necessary information and must be easily human-readable. For a comp shot render for example date is pretty irrelevant, because it makes no difference when exactly a version was created. It either is the last (newest) version or some older one. Date only does not automatically version up in any software I know and version + date can create conflicting situations due to human error where version token gives one order but date another.