Curve Editor Limit?

[user_deleted]

Hi,

I'm currently working on a film project and we're receiving the plates as DPX files. In order to match the timecode in Shake to the DPX files, I'm importing all the sequences with the "sequence start" setting in the FileIn node. This works fine, and allows me to burn in timecode on our FileOut nodes that exactly matches the DPX originals. The DPX files have timecodes that go up to well over 1,000,000 (around 11 hours).

The problem I'm facing is with using the curve editor with frame numbers this high. If I import camera tracking data from Boujou, it always starts with frame 1 (I can offest the start frame in the Boujou export, but only up to 9999 frames I think). So when I import this data, I then need to slip it all in time to match the actual DPX sequence start frame. I use the curve editor to do this, which works fine, until we get to DPX sequences whose frame numbers go to over 1,000,000. The curve editor appears to not allow me to drag anything past this frame number, so I can't get my imported curves to the frames I need.

Has anyone else ever had this problem? Is there a neat workaround that I can use, or any way I can tell the curve editor to ignore this 1 million frame limit?

Many thanks in advance,

Tom

[deke-kincaid]

Try changing it in the shake script instead of in the gui. .shk files are just ascii text.

[user_deleted]

Maybe it's a bit complicated as a workaround, but you can renumber your fileouts:
Let's say you have a script ranging 1,000,001-1,000,100.
Just work with it in 1-100 range (remap to 1-100 so the curveeditor works as it normally does) and as fileout use somthing like
"test.#+1000000.dpx".

If you need to burn in frame numbers just add the 1,000,000 there, too.

FR

[user_deleted]

Thanks for the advice. I've been using the second option (subtracting 1,000,000 frames from the sequence frame numbers) and it works OK - just a pain to have to remember which ones I've done this on when I've got 200 VFX shots to organise! Hopefully 4.1 will sort this limit out (surely I can't be the only person working with these kind of frame ranges?)

Cheers

Tom

[deke-kincaid]

It's pretty rare. Usually reels are broken into sequences and shots. Each shot starts at something like frame 1(or frame 9 for example if it has 8 frame handles). It is up to editorial to assemble those shots into the original reels.

Rarely do we work with the frame numbers from the original reel. I would leave this final frame numbering as part of I/O departments job. They should have a database/master list of where all the original frames were grabed from.