FrameFixer User Manual
Contents
1. gt or P Play the sequence it will read cache the frames as it goes ESC Stop playback S Toggle between the processed and original frames A Toggle between displaying the Alpha and RGB channels CTRL L Show Hide the Message Log Window CTRL G Set the input focus to the goto frame field F1 Display the Online Documentation You can view this table from within FrameFixer by clicking Keyboard Shortcuts from under the Help menu If you find that the shortcut keys aren t working you may need to click on the image area to get the mouse focus back usually after adjusting the interpolation controls Appendix B File Sequence Syntax For command line use and within the file sequence browser FrameFixer uses the same sequence syntax made popular by Apple s Shake compositing package which is BASENAME FRAME NUMBERS EXTENSION Where FRAME NUMBERS can be any number of sub sequences or single frames comma delimited and the start end step of a sub sequence is specified with START ENDxSTEP e g 1 100x1 STEP is optional when its value is one Padding is specified by following the sub sequence with a character for 4 digit padding e g sequence 0001 exr a character for no padding e g sequence 1 exr For other padding widths you repeat the character e g sequence exr for 3 digit padding Although this format is extremely flexible in most cases you only have a single range of con2. a i FRAME FIXER With MotionRepair technology from THE FOUNDRY FRAME FIXER USER DOCUMENTATION Copyright Technolumiere Limited 2006 2007 Table of Contents HAMM ETES LE SSSR ERNST SRE 3 Quickstart COHACIEG ee oen o ede Sais vate rendu dad acess binc a IUD DN MR d uM E M cM MU E DE d MEE 4 Me AEN cde RETO TTE 5 Ra tae atc ae erence eee 5 Microsoft I node a db DE tatoo on 5 PU A ee a ee 5 LICENSING TOO TE LEO a RE aa 6 Loading Image SSSR needs dar intense 7 Marking Processing and Saving Frames 8 Aem lele ale P E E T 8 Interpolation Method and Seti iS nice ment dant 9 Interpolation LISSE SETTE 9 Optical Plow Settings So nee eet cx a gd uocis a Ca bala ca dg rU x Fia abusu a uode 9 image Processing COODIFOIS a aw was bin i nn eE E dad eE dame D pete Eas EC e ip 11 Preferentes CETT T cmm 12 Memory Cache LImil iaaeeeee eter Iter herren osse deesse sten ta ko s ixeco erac ub En Dn pan eTETEEO 12 EIQOLLQAMLIRMM T 12 OpenGL Method dns ceci der ec 13 Aut Tagging ALL SRE TOP TER EE TEE aa a PEUT Masa atis Ma RE EEEE Re 13 Proy CAE oree a a S ET 13 Mise COEUR enci iamen di dE qM EDO aO AS MU A a E dee E 13 Running from the Command LITIG uiieeu cuui eee rrr pna epar nR aro npa cz oru aae nt haeret 14 Appendix A Keyboard ShortCUtS rirse oe knnen Qe Ee eumd tabe sereine cesse sienne 15 Appendix B File Sequence SVM AN oec oe uto Eb
3. Memory Cache Limit MB Proxy Scale 96 TE Display LUT Misc z lin2log lut Auto Tag Missing Frames x Backup Original Frames Image Red Border Image Drop Shadow x Multithreaded Processing OpenGL Method O DrawPixels Texture Quad Texture Quad x4 Auto tagging Script lusr local framefixer test py X Cancel ox Memory Cache Limit Controls how much memory the application will use to cache the proxy display images This is initially set to 200MB but you can set it lower if you re running short on memory or higher to cache longer sequences for playback FrameFixer will not always use the full cache limit shorter sequences can be cached in much less memory When the cache limit is reached frames that have not been accessed recently will be cleared from the cache and the yellow bar will disappear from those frames in the timeline Display LUT FrameFixer can use a custom lookup table LUT to modify how colors are displayed The most common need for this is when dealing with film images which often have their data encoded in a logarithmic format The FrameFixer installation contains a luts directory and any files found there with a lut extension are available in the LUT drop down menu in the Preferences dialog The LUT files use the same format as used by Apple s Shake more details can be found in the readme txt file loc
4. These controls can be used to fine tune the optical flow interpolation The default values work well in most cases but if it is not working well there are plenty of things to adjust here These controls match those found in The Foundry s Furnace plugin suite so if you re familiar with those you should feel right at home here Vector Detail Controls the density of the optical flow field or how many positions to track across the neighboring frames A value of 1 0 tracks every pixel in the image and 0 5 tracks every second pixel The default value gives a good result for high resolution images film and HD but you should probably go closer to 1 0 when working at PAL NTSC video resolution Global Smoothness Local Smoothness Smoothing Iterations Error Threshold Block Size Extreme Filtering Correct Luminance Use Alpha Mattes After tracking features between the neighboring frames a smoothing process is applied to the optical flow field The Global Smoothness parameter controls the amount of smoothing applied to larger areas of movement in the image Like Global Smoothness but this parameter changes how the smoothing affects the finer details Controls how many smoothing passes are run over the flow field s motion vectors A larger value will usually produce a better result but will take longer to compute Differences in pixel values below this threshold are ignored to prevent noise or grain in the images from
5. Tinder and Furnace suites Copyright Technolumiere Limited 2006 2007 Quickstart Guide This quick start guide describes the graphical work flow for command line use please see the section entitled Running from the Command Line To correct one or more frames in a sequence first launch FrameFixer and select Open Sequence from the File menu or double click the empty viewing area This brings up the File Sequence Browser where each image sequence is listed as a single entry When you double click a sequence it will then be shown in the main image display area and the playback timeline will be updated to show the frame range you have loaded Next using the timeline simply move to a frame you wish to repair and press the SPACE key on your keyboard or press the Mark Unmark Current Frame button in the lower right corner of the window That frame will now be drawn in red in the timeline and is marked for processing When you have finished marking the corrupt frames press the ENTER key or click the Process Frames button in the lower right corner and the frames will be processed When complete the processed frames will be marked in green on the timeline and if you move to that frame you can see the corrected image If you are happy with the results you can save the processed frames back to disk by pressing CTRL S or click the Save Frames button If you want to discard any of the processed frames before saving move to the
6. check the result If you are happy with the results press CTRL S or click the Save Frames button to save the results back to disk in the same format as the rest of the sequence You should then have a complete sequence that will play back smoothly If you are not happy with a generated frame press SPACE on that frame to unmark it and discard the results You might then re process it using different settings see Interpolation Method and Settings below Auto tagging Any missing or zero byte files will be automatically marked when you import the sequence though this behavior can be turned off in the Preferences dialog This simple test is the best that can be done in the general case across all image formats and rendering pipelines However in certain situations more sophisticated checking is possible and you can extend FrameFixer s auto tagging functionality in the Preferences dialog by specifying a command or script to run on each frame to test if it should be tagged For example perhaps the 3D rendering package you use places a tag in the header when it starts writing the image and clears it when it is complete you could then have a small utility to check for this flag and report the result back to FrameFixer Your custom auto tagging script will be run once per frame and passed the full path name of the image as a command line argument It should return status 0 if the image is complete or any other value if it should be ta
7. display area Multithreaded Processing with this option turned on FrameFixer will multi thread the image processing using all local CPUs It also controls multi threaded image loading of formats that support it currently only EXR Running from the Command Line FrameFixer fully supports execution from the command line As well as being more convenient for some uses it also allows FrameFixer to be used by other tools within a complex production pipeline For example you might configure your render farm to automatically run FrameFixer over the sequence when a render task completes To get a full rundown of the available command line options simply run FrameFixer with help or help or h to display the following usage information Usage framefixer options sequence f fix str fix the specified frame s e g f 10 32 92 CMD m mark lt str gt mark the specified frames s e g m 10 32 92 GUI a auto fix all auto tagged frames CMD ors cache cache the image sequence being loaded GUI g gui Show GUI even if all parameters are specified ng nogui dont show GUI require all parameters on command line ed threads int number of CPUs to use 0 meaning all CMD avg average use simple frame averaging instead of optical flow interpolation vd vectorDetail float optical flow vector detail gs globalSmooth float optical flow global smoothness ls localSmooth float o
8. file with that name already there The Windows version of FrameFixer is hard coded to look for the license file there and under Linux and OS X the FrameFixer launch script sets the LM LICENSE FILE environment variable to this location by default If you have a floating license a license server needs to be installed to a machine on your network There is a FLEXIm directory within the FrameFixer installation which contains the license server daemon some diagnostic tools and a readme txt with more specific instructions on getting the license server running After setting up the license daemon you will then need to save your license file over license dat in the FrameFixer installation directory or set the LM LICENSE FILE environment variable to point to the license server e g 27000 yourserver If you are having trouble getting the licensing to work you can set the environment variable FRAMEFIXER IGNORE NO LICENSE in a command shell then launch FrameFixer and attempt to fix a sequence At the start of processing instead of a dialog box informing you that there is no license you will instead get a FLEXIm license error message which might point you to the problem or you can send the output to the support email address for help Loading Image Sequences Of course the first step to getting your image sequence repaired is to load the sequence into FrameFixer You can load a sequence by selecting the Open Sequence option in the File menu You
9. frame and press SPACE again After processing and saving the synthesized frames you will have a complete image sequence Any existing frames you have replaced will be saved with a bak file extension SO you can always review or revert to them later That s all there is to it Installation The FrameFixer application looks and functions much the same under all the supported operating systems Therefore the majority of the documentation is the same for all platforms except for these instructions on installing and launching the application The application is self contained and doesn t require any changes to be made to your system so installation is just a matter of extracting the downloaded archive to your preferred location Linux Extract the FrameFixer archive to your preferred location e g usr local framefixer and simply run the framefixer script located in that directory Of course you may want to setup an alias or modify your path to be able to run it without specifying the full path Please ensure you have recent OpenGL and display drivers installed and you may also need to install some additional Linux libraries if you have a non standard installation FrameFixer has been tested on the following Linux installations Fedora Core 2 Fedora Core 4 Debian 3 1 SUSE 9 2 Ubuntu 6 06 Ubuntu 6 10 Microsoft Windows Extract the FrameFixer zip archive using Winzip or a similar utility to your preferred location e g C Pro
10. no iedeen ianei diaaa ii REM qub 16 Appendix C End User License Agreement 17 Copyright Technolumiere Limited 2006 2007 2 Introduction FrameFixer aims to smooth the work flow and reduce stress in busy production environments by removing the problem of corrupt or missing frames from 3D rendering FrameFixer works by analyzing only the output images no scene files or other data is required to reproduce the missing frames and unlike simple frame averaging or other quick fixes the results match how the true frame would look and in many cases the generated frames are indistinguishable from the adjacent frames FrameFixer enables quicker turnaround for dailies and other review processes so that decisions and further iterations can be made instead of waiting for the missing frames to be re rendered before any further progress can be made Using FrameFixer you can easily work through any missing frames encountered during your production only needing to correct them before your final deliveries The amount of time this saves over the duration of a typical production can be significant not to mention the peace of mind in knowing you ll be able to reliably deliver and review your work each day regardless of render glitches The high quality interpolation used by FrameFixer is achieved by using advanced optical flow motion analysis technology from The Foundry www thefoundry co uk makers of acclaimed high end compositing plugins such as the
11. ASED YOU MAY NOT ALLOW THE SOFTWARE TO BE USED BY ANY THIRD PARTY HAVING ACCESS TO YOUR LICENSE SERVER YOU MAY NOT SELL RENT LEASE OR TRANSFER YOUR LICENSE TO A THIRD PARTY NO MODIFICATION IS PERMITTED TO THE COMPILED OR BINARY COMPONENTS OF THE SOFTWARE AND LIKEWISE NO REVERSE ENGINEERING DECOMPILATION OR DISASSEMBLY OF THE SOFTWARE IS PERMITTED FOR ANY PURPOSE FRAMEFIXER SOFTWARE AND DOCUMENTATION COPYRIGHT TECHNOLUMIERE LIMITED 2006 2007
12. ated in FrameFixer s LUTs directory along with some example files The LUTs are only used for displaying the preview proxy images no color lookups are ever saved back to your sequences OpenGL Method If you are having trouble with the image display area or if you have extremely slow playback speed you can try the different options here This is normally only needed to get around problems with display driver setup under Linux Auto Tagging Script FrameFixer can tag missing or empty files during loading You can extend this functionality by specifying the full path to a custom auto tagging script here that is tailored to your own pipeline See the section on Auto tagging earlier in this document for more details Proxy Scale FrameFixer can display proxy images at a lower resolution than your sequence This allows you to scrub and play back much longer sequences that if you were loading the full resolution and may also speed up loading particularly if using display LUTs You can specify the proxy scale here which defaults to 1 0 full resolution Misc Options Auto Tag you can disable FrameFixer s auto tagging functionality here see the section on Auto tagging for more information Backup Original Frames When you save a processed frame FrameFixer will backup the existing frame with the extension bak or subsequently bak02 bak03 etc Image Red Border Image Drop Shadow controls whether these are drawn around the image
13. being interpreted as motion You may need to raise this value for very noisy or grainy images This parameter controls how the optical flow algorithm finds features in the image If you are getting poor results for a certain sequence you can try setting this value up or down by a few pixels With this option off bilinear filtering is used to reconstruct the interpolated images This is fast but can produce soft results when there is a lot of motion Turn on Extreme Filtering for a much sharper result but this will take a lot longer to compute If there are luminance changes between the neighboring frames i e the sequence is getting darker or lighter at that point then you should turn on this option which will equalize the brightness of the two images before calculating the optical flow field FrameFixer will use the alpha channel of the images to help lock on to the edges of objects when calculating the optical flow field You may need to turn this off if your sequence has an alpha channel containing something other than a matte of your foreground or all objects If you hover the mouse pointer over these controls in the interface a brief tool tip will be shown describing that parameter Image Processing Controls In situations where the optical flow hasn t been able to lock on to the image well such as lots of small objects moving around quickly it may produce a darker or softer result This is because the optical flow field in thi
14. could also press CTRL O or double click on the empty image area that initially says no images loaded This will open a File Sequence Browser where each image sequence is listed as a single entry e g sequence 005 1 30 tif The sequence format shown in this dialog and used in the command line options uses the same syntax made popular by Apple s Shake compositing package For a description of the sequence syntax see Appendix B The File Sequence Browser is normally set to ignore any missing frames so if you have a sequence with frames 1 to 100 but frame 33 is missing it would be listed as something like sequence 1 100 exr rather than sequence 1 32 34 100 exr The following image formats are currently supported by FrameFixer please let us know any others that would be helpful to you EXR Maya IFF TIFF Softimage PIC Cineon TGA DPX JPEG SGI PNG FrameFixer does not immediately load all the images into memory but loads each frame only when it is first viewed In the timeline you can see a yellow bar at the bottom of any frames that have had their images loaded You will be able to quickly move around the timeline and play back your sequence at full speed within the cached range For long sequences it is quickest to only cache the few frames around those being corrected so that you can scrub back and forth around those areas to check the processed results However you can also tell FrameFixer to cache all the frames i
15. gged as a bad frame If a custom script is specified then the default behavior of tagging missing and zero byte files will be skipped so your script should also check for these To use a custom script specify its full path in the FrameFixer Preferences dialog Interpolation Method and Settings FrameFixer should produce good results using the default settings but in some cases you might benefit from adjusting the interpolation method or optical flow settings These controls can be found in the panel to the right of the image display area Interpolation Method Optical Flow is the usual method of interpolation This attempts to track the movement of features between the frames before and after the one being processed and interpolates them to produce the frame in between In most cases this method gives excellent results but it can occasionally give poor results with sequences featuring chaotic movement such as lots of small object moving around As an alternative to optical flow FrameFixer can also use simple frame averaging which mixes together the frames either side of the one being replaced This will normally show a double vision effect in areas of movement and can also produce a slight jump when playing back So although it isn t ideal frame averaging is a good fall back option for the rare cases when the optical flow results aren t satisfactory Original Frame Optical Flow Interpolation Frame Averaging Optical Flow Settings
16. gram Files FrameFixer or N Apps FrameFixer You can then run the program by double clicking the FrameFixer exe application file within that directory using the Windows Explorer or execute it in the command shell You can optionally right click and drag the application into your Start Menu or Desktop to create a shortcut for quicker access be sure to make a shortcut not move the file FrameFixer has been written for Windows XP or later It may run on earlier versions of Windows but this is not supported Apple Mac OS X Double click the FrameFixer disk image dmg file to mount it then simply drag FrameFixer app into your Applications folder or any other location if you prefer You can then run the program by double clicking the FrameFixer application file within that directory using the Finder FrameFixer has been written to run under OS X v10 4 or later It may run under earlier versions of OS X though it is not supported Licensing The FrameFixer application will run without a license but you will need to install one before you can process any frames FrameFixer s image processing uses the industry standard FLEXIm licensing system You can purchase node locked or floating licenses and request evaluation licenses from the FrameFixer web site www framefixer com If you are using a node locked license all you need to do is save your license to the license dat file in the FrameFixer installation directory there will be an empty
17. n the playback range by selecting the Cache Playback Range option from the File menu or specifying the c option when loading a sequence from the command line The maximum amount of cache memory to be used is set in the Preferences dialog A color lookup table LUT can be applied to the preview images which is often needed when dealing with film images See the section on Display LUTs under Preferences later in this document Marking Processing and Saving Frames After loading in a sequence you can move around the timeline or play the clip Navigate to the frame you wish to repair and press the SPACE key to mark it as a bad frame or press the Mark Unmark Current Frame button in the lower right corner of the window That frame will then be colored red in the timeline showing it is marked for processing When you have marked the frames you want to process press ENTER or click the Process Frames button in the lower right corner and FrameFixer will generate those images using the current interpolation method and quality settings When the processing is complete the generated frames will be colored in green on the timeline and if you move to that frame you will see the generated result You can press the S key to toggle the display between the original frame if there is one and the generated frame or press A to toggle the display between the RGB and alpha channels Scrub back and forth over the frame and its surrounding frames to
18. ptical flow local smoothness si smoothIter int optical flow smoothing iterations et errorThresh lt float gt optical flow error threshold bs blockSize int optical flow block size ef extremeFilter bool optical flow extreme filtering cl correctLum bool optical flow correct luminance ua useAlpha bool optical flow use alpha mattes h help Show this help message Some of the options only affect the program when running in command line mode and others are only for graphical mode These are marked CMD and GUI respectively If sufficient options are specified on the command line then FrameFixer will process the frames without showing the graphical interface You can force it to open with interface with the gui flag or force it to require all options on the command line with the nogui flag Appendix A Keyboard Shortcuts Key Function SPACE Mark or Unmark the current frame ENTER Process all marked frames CTRL O Open the File Sequence Browser CTRL S Save any processed frames back to disk CTRL U Unmark All Frames LEFT Step back one frame RIGHT Step forward one frame CTRL LEFT Jump to the start of the playback range the in point CTRL RIGHT Jump to the end of the playback range the out point SHIFT LEFT Jump to the previous marked or fixed frame SHIFT RIGHT Jump to the next marked or fixed frame
19. s case is quite erratic and causes a lot of blending to occur within the image In this case you can adjust the brightness and sharpness values to more closely match the image to the rest of your sequence If this is necessary then the final result isn t likely to be particularly good as it means the interpolation has not gone well but it can help make a poor result more satisfactory To make an adjustment move to a processed frame and you will notice the Brightness and Sharpness controls become active Type in a value and press ENTER After a brief computation you will see the adjusted result in the image preview Adjustments are non destructive so you can change these values back and forth with no loss of quality If you get a slightly soft but otherwise good result from the optical flow interpolation then you should get a better result by reprocessing the frame with the Extreme Filtering parameter turned on rather than sharpening as a post process The default brightness value of 1 0 and sharpness value of 0 0 make no change to the images Preferences You can open the Preferences dialog by selecting the Preferences menu item in the File menu relocated under the main FrameFixer menu in OS X The preferences are saved to a framefixer file in your home directory which is a hidden file under Linux A file called default prefs in the FrameFixer installation directory defines the initial preferences FrameFixer Preferences
20. tinuous frames and it is very simple here are a few common examples sequence 1 50 exr frames 1 to 50 no padding sequence 1 50 exr frames 1 to 50 padded 2 digits sequence 1 100 exr frames 1 to 100 padded 4 digits sequence 20 40x2 exr frames 20 to 40 with a step of 2 no padding Appendix C End User License Agreement In using the FrameFixer software you agree to the following terms THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND EXPRESS IMPLIED OR OTHERWISE INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE IN NO EVENT SHALL TECHNOLUMIERE LIMITED OR ANDREW CHAPMAN BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL INCIDENTAL INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE DATA OR PROFITS WHETHER OR NOT ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF DAMAGE AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY OR NEGLIGENCE ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE YOU AGREE TO ABIDE BY THE SOFTWARE LICENSING RESTRICTIONS APPLIED TO THE SOFTWARE AND AGREE TO MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO CIRCUMVENT THESE MECHANISMS IF YOU HAVE PURCHASED A NODE LOCKED LICENSE YOU AGREE TO USE THE SOFTWARE EXCLUSIVELY ON THE COMPUTER FOR WHICH THE LICENSE WAS PURCHASED IF YOU HAVE PURCHASED A FLOATING LICENSE YOU AGREE TO CONCURRENTLY USING AT MOST THE NUMBER OF LICENSES PURCHASED AND FOR NO LONGER THAN THE PERIOD OF LICENSE VALIDITY PURCH
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