6th Sep 2021 | Open Movies | Sprite Fright
Contact Sheet Add-on
Paul Golter
Pipeline TD
In this article, you will learn how the contact sheet add-on works and why it was developed.
Contact Sheets
The concept of contact sheets or contact prints has existed for some time; in fact, their origins lie in analog photography and film. They are sheets filled with thumbnail photos from the shoot. These photos are assembled in a grid and give you a great continuous overview of your film. Contact sheets are also useful for letting your client chose a specific image while comparing all your images in one glance.
You're probably already thinking, "Hey, this would be useful in Blender!" Happily, we got you covered.
For Sprite Fright I developed a little Blender add-on that can create a contact sheet from Sequence Editor strips. The add-on helps various departments, but especially those in lighting as it gives a quick overview of the whole sequence. That way, they can validate whether the shots in a sequence look consistent and the overall effect is harmonious.
The add-on creates a separate scene and makes use of Blender's proxy system to enable faster display. It uses nested Metastrips to stack all sequences on top of each other, to work around the limitation of 32 channels in the Sequence Editor. The great thing is, that it also works with videos. I can very much recommend rendering a contact sheet consisting of many little videos; it's fascinating!
There are a couple of parameters exposed to adjust the contact sheet. You can specify the resolution, override the number of rows and in the add-on preferences, you even have a scaling factor that controls how much space there is between the individual images.
The add-on is part of the Blender Studio Tools repository, which you can find here.
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Subscribe for €11.50/monthPaul Golter
Pipeline TD
6 Comments
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Jesús Odremán
7th September 2021 - 13:16
Best regards I find it a super useful and necessary plug-in for the Animation Pipeline ... And in my personal case, as an editor and post-producer, I find that this plug-in would be an excellent starting point for developing a multi-camera workflow in Blender. I do not know if this already exists (I will review), and if it does not exist, I leave the idea here:
When I talk about multi-camera editing, I mean the possibility of assigning cut points on the fly while the time line is in playback mode, with each channel related to a button on the keyboard, and that, when playing, a cut and change of plane according to the position in the timeline and the track number. For this to happen, the editing program must be very precise in controlling the input and output timecodes of the clips, and their relationship to their position on the timeline.
Something that could be achieved if in Blender the management of EDL (Editing Decision List) is incorporated in some way, or something similar based on CMX3600, XML or OpenTimeline.IO.
I understand that this maybe exceeds the scope of development in the Pipeline of the short film Sprite Fright, but, I still think it can be interesting and useful, so I would like to know if you allow me to share this comment on rightclick or Blender Today ... Where perhaps someone with competence can use the idea. :)
Again, thank you very much for all your effort and development work, and for the art !!!
much success in the Sprite Fright process !!!!
Greetings
Jesus
ALAN KODZAEV
24th October 2021 - 12:41
@Jesús Odremán thank you Jesus
TANDG
4th February 2022 - 17:22
Can you please explain how to download the plugin in this repository.
Frederic Lierman
21st December 2021 - 17:08
Are there any resources that explain how to download the addon from the repository?
jiahong he
1st March 2022 - 03:40
Can anyone tell me how to download the file in Blender Studio Tools · rBSTS ?
Brune Marie de Miscault
30th October 2022 - 03:38
To download the addon, you'll need to install Git first on your computer. https://git-scm.com/download/ Open git bash, and use this command $ git clone http://git.blender.org/blender-studio-tools.git find the blender studio folder and copy the contactsheet addon in your blender script addons folder. See the readme after you downloaded the git repository for a better and complete explanation. The readme is also accessible directly in the git repository. Hope this help.