The topic of being able to archive soft-imported clips used in a timeline, batch, whatever in the original format and not duplicated has come up many times. Basically a way to “collect files”. I thought it’d be interesting to start working on a script to do this, or at least attempt to.
That said, I’ve run into a stumbling block: How to drill down into an unknown level of sub-folders until you find either a sequence, clip or batchgroup? If this was on a normal filesystem you could easily use os.walk and let it do it’s thing but, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to do that within the Flame.
I feel like there’s some clever way to write some sort of loop that can continue to call itself and keep running again when a new folder is found within the current folder.
Some simple code I’ve been testing with:
def dump_entries(selection):
import flame
for libraries in flame.project.current_project.current_workspace.libraries:
print ("- ", libraries.name)
for folder in libraries.folders:
print (" +-- ", folder.name)
if has_subfolder(folder):
for i in range(len(folder.folders)):
print (" +-- ", folder.folders[i].name)
if has_subfolder(folder.folders[i]):
for x in range(len(folder.folders[i].folders)):
print (" +-- ", folder.folders[i].folders[x].name)
def has_subfolder(selection):
import flame
if len(selection.folders) == 0:
return False
else:
return True
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions of what else to look at? My python skills are pretty “throw a dart at the board” style so when it comes to more complex structures and whatnot I’m pretty lost.
Recursion is your friend!
By calling the function from itself again you can traverse through an unknown level of subfolders.
Here is a little example to build a list of all clips. I’ve modified some names slightly to stick to some Autodesk terminology (e.g. clips instead of entries etc.) to make things more understandable. Hope this helps.
import flame
clips = []
def build_clip_list(current_folder):
"""recursive search for entries"""
global clips
for folder in current_folder:
if has_subfolder(folder):
build_clip_list(folder.folders)
for clip in folder.clips:
clips.append(clip)
def collect_clips():
"""function that returns all clips as a list"""
global clips
clips = []
for library in flame.project.current_project.current_workspace.libraries:
build_clip_list(library.folders)
return clips
def has_subfolder(folder):
"""check if the given folder has any subfolders"""
if len(folder.folders) == 0:
return False
else:
return True
print collect_clips()
This could be improved by running set on the list at the end or implementing another mechanism to avoid duplicate entries in the list.
Since we’re here…do you know if it’s possible to get the sequence range from a file path? Currently I can only seem to get collected_clips[i].versions[0].tracks[0].segments[0].file_path to return the file path of the first file.
I.e. that will currently return somefile_0000.exr and not somefile_[0000-0120].exr which is what .mio files hold as well as what’s shown in the media panel under clip information.
I don’t know of a direct implementation. Not in Flame and not in Python in general. However there are projects like this, which can be a great starting point if you don’t want to reinvent the wheel:
Knowing the file path to the first frame, you could parse the directory to get the entire sequence.
