Hi.

I'm wondering what is the purpose of the "Render Animation" > "Image Sequence" > "Start numbering at" option? I'm not sure I've understood the documentation.

Thanks

In the documentation, it is labelled as "Naming Sequence starts with" but in the Render Animation window it is called "Start numbering at".

The documentation is a bit confusing at first and you need to experiment with it to fully understand what it does, by rendering out a subset of frame ranges from an animation and seeing what happens

However, the only time you need to be concerned about this is is you really do want to have the intermediate .png sequence (which is used by ffmpeg and can be used by other applications such as GIMP). By adjusting the first/last frame (of the animation) numbers and the 'start numbering at' value (of the .png sequence), you can create a .png sequence of any numbering range you feel that you want or need.

Normally, you would only select Video, instead of Both, and would thus have the .png sequence discarded after rendering. If you have a very slow computer with a very long animation, then if there is a glitch that ruins some parts of the sequence, it may be useful to render out some part again, adjusting the frame and start number accordingly. Personally, I'd set it going from the start again and go to have a cup of tea.

In theory, you can open the .png sequence with GIMP and render it out as an animated .gif. However, GIMP reads the sequence in reverse order and thus makes a reverse time animation, which is annoying. I haven't tried Rendering in reverse order to get around this problem because I've never had a problem rendering with ffmpeg. I'd recommend rendering to .gif because the video formats have large compression that ruins fine detail (in my opinion).

Many thanks for the reply.

So it shifts the starting number of the file names by X digits.
I was under the impression it served to literally pick a starting number.

Maybe it would be clearer to change the field label with, for example:
"Shift numbering by digits" instead of "Starting numbering at"?

(It could be I'm incorrectly translating or misunderstanding what the label says in english...)

It does serve to literally pick a starting number, the starting number of the .png output sequence. This is useful, as the documentation says, for when you want to use a rendering application that doesn't accept '0' as an intial number, so you can start the sequence at '1'. That would be, as far as I can imagine, the main use for it. Unless you have a rendering application of this type, that you much prefer over ffmpeg, then this serves no useful purpose since ffmpeg accepts .png sequences starting with '0'.

In another 'edge case' use, you may want to have a particular range of numbers for your .png sequence and you may want to render out a limited range of frame numbers from your animation. In this case, then the .png output sequence numbering would be 'shifted' from the animation frame sequence numbering as you suggest. However, the .png sequence is regarded as a separate entity or product and so the effect on numbering is not described in that way.

If you actually need use this facility in that way, then you would be deeply involved in 'surgery' on .png animation sequences and so you would quickly become familiar with it. For most people in most cases, using ffmpeg, it is a detail that they will never have to consider or use.

A 'believable' use that I can think of is where you have more than one animation, not all in krita perhaps, and you want to do cut and paste of animation frame ranges from different animation files without the risk of editing the files themselves. Then you could produce different animation frame ranges from different animation files and adjusting the .png start number each time, you could produce the appropriate .png numbering for the final end result animation. Then, you would have a final product in the form of a large .png sequence. After that you'd have to use some application to render them to video, perhaps by learning how to manually drive ffmpeg or some other application.

If you were involved in that level of complexity of producing animations then you probably wouldn't be using Krita to make them.

Thanks for the thorough reply.

I still believe that the label description sounds ambiguous though, because it says "Start numbering at" which means to me: type in a custom starting number.

Actually it reads the value and adds it to the numbers used in exported images file names, which makes a different logic.

thanks