Final Edit and Output - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 327

need to know how many rendered frames are in the shot, as well as the starting frame number. This informa-
tion will be obvious upon examination of the directory containing the rendered frames. For shot 01 of The
Beast there were 471 frames, beginning with frame number 350. Enter the total number of frames in the shot
in the Frs: fi eld. Then, enter 1 less than the fi rst frame number in the Offs: fi eld. For example, if the fi rst
frame number of your shot is 729, you would enter 728. So, if the fi rst frame number is 1 , then the default
value of 0 will work fi ne. Finally, enable the Auto Refresh button in the lower left of the node. Figure 16.6
shows the Image node set up for shot 01 from The Beast .

Figure 16.5 The fi rst image selected and set to
Sequence mode

Figure 16.6 An Image input node set up for an
Image Sequence

NOTE
The different “frame range” settings on this node can be a little confusing. The Frs fi eld tells
how many frames overall appear in the Image Sequence. Sfra stands for “Start Frame,” which
is the frame in the current Scene where Blender will start advancing the frames of the Image
Node. In other words, if you set Sfra to 56, Blender will show only the fi rst frame of the image
sequence until frame 56, after which it will begin to advance the images. Finally, Offs tells the
node how to determine which numbered image to show in which frame. If you use an offset
of 100, for example, Blender will look for an image numbered 285 on scene frame number 185
(image # Offset Frame). Offsets can be negative.

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If you have set it up correctly, advancing the Scene frame will cause the preview image in the node
to advance too. Before proceeding with the rest of this node tree, set the proper frame range in this
Scene's Render buttons. This will be from frame 1 through the number of frames in this shot plus 1.