While developing Conform Studio I stumbled upon an application of the CS Extract script which I considered interesting, but did not have enough time to code and test properly. It was only a matter of time when other people attempted to use the Studio in this manner, therefore I even included a note in the manual about it.
Behold Trim N Collect – a fully-fledged solution to trim your projects to reduce their archive time and size. Turn your 15 minute shots into these 75 frames that you are actually using, and replace them on a frame-accurate level.
A lot of care went into the creation of this script, and I tried to take into consideration as many workflows as I could think of. For one, by default the script only trims your image and OpenEXR sequences, without transcoding. You can of course choose to transcode either, although be aware that you will loose the multichannel information in OpenEXR if you do so. You can also copy the image and OpenEXR sequences in their entirety, if you so desire. And of course different encoding presets can be applied to files with and without the alpha channel.
The two limitations which I was not able to get around was having to manually accept CameraRAW settings on the reimporting of DNG and CinemaDNG files. Essentially you will have to press enter as many times, as many DNG sequences you have in your project. This is unavoidable, and there is nothing I can do about it except pester Adobe to remove this dialog box on import. Also, it’s not possible to automatically collect the assets – like texture files – from C4D projects. This functionality, added in CC 2014.1, can so far be only performed manually. Therefore I added an option not to perform automatic collect, but let you do it on your own.
There are also the same limitations with time-remapping that were present in Conform Studio, but that’s unavoidable, and hopefully these issues will not be a limitation for you. Because other than that, this tool is so great I now use it to archive all my projects.
Trim N Collect can be ordered from aescripts + aeplugins website, costs $49 until January 12th, and $59 later on. Current Conform Studio users can obtain a license for $39. I hope it makes your life and archive much easier. Have fun!
Future possibilities
If you are interested in a solution that would trim R3D media without transcoding, or collect assets from C4D files automatically, and are prepared to pay extra, let me know. I have an idea how to implement these two features, but they involve a bit of low-level coding, and possibly a custom setup. If there is enough interest in the market, it might make the project worthwhile.
