Hi folks, I’m working with a flame op who has a background in nuke. He’s having trouble managing the versions of his segments on his timeline; we’re using OpenClip but we’re finding it a bit temperamental; in one instance I’ve found a new version of an exr sequence we’re using was missing input/frame metadata and this appeared to make it not readable on our timeline, and I’ve heard that he’s been having other issues besides this (that I’ve not yet verified/reproduced).
What he really sounds like he’s missing is an easy way to version up and down the path being read in. In nuke, you can select a read node and press alt+up or alt+down on your keyboard; this finds the version numbers in the path, increments/decrements them, and sets this new path back on your read node, meaning you’re now referencing a new path. Currently, where he’s unable to load in a target version using OpenClip he has to navigate to the file he wants in the mediahub and pull it into the timeline from there, which can be quite stressful during when there’s client in the room!
I did have a go at using the flame python API but I didn’t get particularly far, I can see that PySegment has a file_path attribute, but this seems to be read-only. I did begin to work up a proof of concept where I’d take this file path, increment/decrement it similarly to nuke, then import that file, and replace the selected PySegment with a new PySegment generated from this PyClip. However, I had to do some gymnastics to insert my new PySegment into the timeline at the right place, without disturbing the following PySegments, and in any case my new PySegment obviously doesn’t have the correct handles or timeline fx by default, so I’d need to copy these across.
In general I’m getting the feeling I am wrestling the flame api rather than working with it, probably due to my infamiliarity with it, but possibly because I’m not approaching this correctly. I suspect what I may need to do is go back to OpenClip and enumerate the issues we’re having and address them individually. Nonetheless I’m a bit surprised that there’s seems to not be a way to do something like
my_segment.file_path = "/path/to/some/file.mov"
What do you think; am I missing something obvious? Apologies that this is a bit open ended!