I have several Movie files and would like to make a sequence with “Locked to Timeline”.
Triggering a movie file with Animation Comp would be a way. But I would like to playback a movie file and jump to any position of the movie by the position of Timeline. So “Locked to Timeline” is the best way if I can set the starting time of the movie.
How can I set the Movie file at any position in Timeline with “Locked to Time”?
For example, how can I start a movie file at 2m 00s in Timeline with “Locked to Time”, no loop?
Alternative way would be a long movie file instead of short several movies. But I don’t want this way.
I tried this way, but cannot get what I want.
I guess that this is very easy but I really cannot find a way.
it is not as straight forward as it may sound. The Locked to Timeline setting will litterally play frame 1 of the movie at frame 1 of the timeline without any offset (that might be a nice addition though).
A possible solution for you would be to use the “Play Mode” parameter setting Specify Index. By default the parameter holds the expression me.time.frame which is the current frame of the timeline. So you can add an offset here: If you are running at the default 60 frames per second and you want the movie to start playing at the 2 minute mark, the expression might become:
me.time.frame - (me.time.rate*120)
me.time.rate refererences the timeline’s framerate and is then multiplied by the number of seconds where the movie should start.
Now also set the “Extend Left” and “Extend Right” parameter on the Trim page of the MovieFileIn TOP’s parameters to Zero to prevent the movie from looping.
Something to watch out for is that your movie might have a different framerate than your timeline. You could either set the timeline to match your movies framerate or select a different unit - for example seconds - from the “Index” parameters unit dropdown. Changing it to seconds, your expression would also have to change slightly:
me.time.seconds - 120
Also, in these cases it might make sense to turn on the “Interpolate Frames” parameter of the Movie File In TOP’s Image parameter page. In case your movie has a lower framerate than your timeline, this will crossfade between frames instead of duplicating them.
perhaps a cleaner approach though would be using a Timer CHOP and in conjunction with segments control the playback of your movies this way. As the Timer CHOP has an option to run parallel timers in a Lock To Timeline mode, all you have to do is create a Table DAT with headers for “begin” and perhaps “length”. Now add new rows per movie you would want to play and fill in the cells for when the movie should start playing and how long it is. By default all these segment units will be set to Seconds.
On the Timer CHOP’s “Timer” parameter page change “Time Control” to Lock to Timeline and on the “Segments” page, drag the Table DAT you just created onto the “Segments DAT” parameter. Also set the “Segment Method” parameter here to Parallel Timers. Last but not least, choose on the “Output” page the options “Timer Fraction” and “Timer Active”. Now when playing forward you should see channels called timer_fraction and timer_active for each row in your segment DAT.
You can now use the timer_fraction channel to control the “Index” parameter of your MovieFileIn TOP and the timer_active channel to use control the “Active” parameter of the MovieFileIn TOP.