I’m trying to do a burn-in with the shot name and the actual frame number of the file sequences in Flame 2023.
I feel like I used to have some way of tricking Flame into doing this, maybe with File Location? That doesn’t seem to work anymore though.
Anyone have a trick that works in 2023?
It is a pain. more so if you have varying handles.
I use the custom start frame burn in metadata FX on each clip and then that drives what frame number the burn in starts on but it isn’t smart and as I said, if your frame handles are not consistent it can be a pain to set up.
you can do it pre flame 2024, it’s a pretty janky work around but it might be priceless if you need a lot of folks to be on the same page with the correct start frame or frame count from shot to shot. like @PlaceYourBetts said it is a pain to setup and if you cut is not locked you will basically being slipping your shots and then making sure to slip your custom track to match otherwise it won’t be accurate.
If you want to do the industry standard and have your burn-in reflect a 1001 start frame do the following:
1.) make a clip of black that is longer than your timeline total duration by a few hundred frames. make sure to hard commit that clip so it’s not a virtual clip.
2.) make a new track in the timeline that is at the very bottom of your main stack (not a new version) ideally underneath everything. put the black clip on that track, replicate all the cuts and then slip each clip of black so it matches your edit. ie if your clip has 10 frames of head trim (so the first visible frame is 1011) slip the black to frame 1011.
3.) add a metadata burn-in at the top of your timeline. add a “frame” burn-in in the information box. Under the ‘layer specific’ menu on the far right set it to source media and set the padding to 4.
4.) finally set the track you want the burn-in to pull the metadata from. if you put the black clips all the way at the bottom of the timeline you will set the Custom Metadata to V1.1 and then under the “text” column set your Track info to ‘custom’
your metadata burn-in will now reflect that frame count in the track with the black clips. for whatever reason sometimes it doesn’t update you may have to step fwd & backward a frame in the timeline if you slip your clip of black then it will usually update. Ive also found that it’s best to hard commit the top layer before exporting to a QT or whatever… otherwise the burn-in will look correct in flame, but once you look at the QT on your server it will be all wrong…
HTH
Yeah, I was really hoping for a way to make it actually work. We have an 8 minute long video where they keep moving shots around that all look very similar without the vfx so I was hoping to really use this to easily determine new start frames and such.
I guess I might just have to stick this mac on his own little 2024 island.
Ok, this is starting to make me feel like I’m crazy. I have installed 2024.2 and moved this project over.
I have a conform made out of image sequences out of Resolve, every image sequence starts at 941 and first frame of picture should be 1001 or so, give or take timecode weirdness and edit changes.
Can someone please explain to me like I’m an idiot how to get the actual number of the actual frame of each sequence to appear on screen? At the moment when I have it set to Source Media and Current it is telling me a number that appears to be the timecode turned into a frame number ie things like 1386721. I just want to know what frame number I’m looking at! If I wanted the timecode there is already a way to do that.
Edit: This works fine if I drop a random comp from Nuke in there, gives me the actual frame number so I know it can do it.
Only media imported in Flame 2024+ have the “start frame” metadata filled. Clips from previous versions will show the “legacy timecode in frames”. If you know what the start frame should be, you can modify it on existing clips via:
Ahhh, ok, so I need to either just re-import everything or change each clip manually.
Thank you! That was driving me crazy!
