Flamenco: Render Input & Output Locations

This is not official documentation, but rather a scratch-pad of ideas. Visit https://flamenco.blender.org/ for the docs.

Render Output

To determine the render output location, some components need to be concatenated to form a path.

It is important for Flamenco Manager to know the exact file paths that will be written, at least down to a pattern like /some/path/to/*.png. That way it can do things like automatically creating a preview video from rendered frames.

Ingredients

These are some possible ingredients to concatenate into an output path:

{DIR}

An arbitrary directory, chosen by the artist from the Flamenco panel. Stored on the Scene, so must be chosen again for every new scene. Could get its default from the addon preferences.

{prefix}

File name prefix, determined by the artist from the Flamenco panel. Stored on the current Scene, so must be chosen again for every new scene. Could get its default from the addon preferences.

{ext}

File name extension. Determined by the settings in Blender's Render Output panel.

{Scene}

Name of the Scene in Blender.

{Job}

Name of the job in Blender. This is new in Flamenco 3: as an artist, you can (at the moment: have to) provide a name for the job. This could default to the current scene name, but it's editable independently.

{SEQ:n}

Sequence counter to make the rest of the path unique. n-digits, so {SEQ:3} is 000-999, {SEQ:2} is 00-99, etc.

{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.nnnn}

Timestamp of when the job was submitted. Will likely be unique.

{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM}

Timestamp of when the job was submitted. Will require {SEQ} to be unique.

{UUID}

Every job gets a unique identifier (a string like ce30617e-e862-40c2-8d47-821293f8ab00). It has no value for humans, but it is the identifier that can be used to look up the job in the Manager's database.

######

Hash marks that define the location & padding of the frame number in the output filename. ######.png would put frame 47 in 000047.png.

Render Output Paths

For these, the artist only chooses {DIR}. The rest is auto-generated:

1. {DIR}/{Job}/{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.nnnn}/######.{ext}
2. {DIR}/{Job}/{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM}-{SEQ:2}/######.{ext}
3. {DIR}/{Job}-{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM}-{SEQ:2}/######.{ext}