Missing Footage Frames: .lock Remover and Temporary Sequence Hole Filler

dashamakarishcheva
Jan 10, 2023
2 min read

Updated: Jul 7

.exe download:

.py and .txt download:

This PowerPoint contains my pitch for a two-part program project:

On occasion SCAD's render farm nodes would not "unlock" a rendered frame and a file sequence would therefore result in empty frames. My goal was to reduce the manual work needed to fix the sequence and to address the resulting empty frames with the use of code.

Research and Script Building

How to find missing frames in a sequence?

Python = set()

Two sets can be checked for their differences, therefore identifying the spots in a sequence missing frames or with different file names:

Convert sequence in folder into a set
Create a set of all the frames that should exist from beginning to end in sequence
Pop all of the existing frames out of the set of the frames that should exist

Before starting this project I was made aware of the set() method to be able to find missing frames in a sequence. However, for the purpose of finding .lock files inside the specific, provided Job_ SCAD render farm output I found that checking for the .lock extension at the end of the file names would be enough to create a list of .lock frames.

Due to the Adobe Killer's ease-of-use, I looked to create something that launches with ease, and a UI in which a user coulds just immediately select a folder for use.

After looking around for a BASH or Command Prompt method, I found that Python can be used to easily create a UI:

from tkinter import Tk

from tkinter.filedialog import askdirectory

path = askdirectory(title='Select Folder') # shows dialog box and return the path

print(path)

When trying to figure out how to run my python script in the Command Prompt terminal I came across this link:

(https://realpython.com/run-python-scripts/#:~:text=To%20run%20Python%20scripts%20with,see%20the%20phrase%20Hello%20World!)

I can explicitly ask for an output for Python code in the Shell:

$ python3 hello.py >> output.txt

Here I learned that you can open a new command prompt window through the command prompt:

(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9392874/bat-file-open-new-cmd-window-and-execute-a-command-in-there)

start cmd.exe /k

These were my notes/used resources on the day I got my script to work:

How to list files in a directory:

(https://www.educative.io/answers/how-to-list-files-in-a-directory-in-python)

How to compare sets:

(https://betterprogramming.pub/a-visual-guide-to-set-comparisons-in-python-6ab7edb9ec41)

(https://www.scaler.com/topics/convert-list-to-set-python/)

Check for specific things in a list:

(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4843158/how-to-check-if-a-string-is-a-substring-of-items-in-a-list-of-strings)

Final Day

So with the confidence given to me by my working script I decided to build a UI.

I tend to have very few tabs open, but at the end of day of my work this is what my tab layout looked like:

Out of all of the sites I visited my greatest help was (https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/thinkcspy/index.html) which not only helped me with my research, but taught me the available possibilities with simple clarity.

I'd come across some code demonstrating the various options that Python allowed me to use to create a UI and drafted up the following visual plan for what I wanted from my program:

For comparison, this is what my UI looked like after I built it and confirmed its functionality: