Render a single video/audio track at a time with a preset

adamjrichman

Building out a stems workflow for wrapping a job out. We kick out one prores4444 w/alpha export per layer of the timeline and add an identifier tag to the sequence filename. Wondering if this could be automated with Excalibur? The idea is that it would selectively hide/show only one video track at a time and queue for export. Bonus points if it could set all disabled tracks to enabled in the process. Workflow would be:

Start with sequence_name-e41-AJR
duplicate to sequence_name-e41-AJR-STEMS
Open up -STEMS
Run script
Mutes all audio tracks; Hides all video tracks. Selects and unhides Video Track 1. Selects all clips. Enables them if they are disabled (this is useful for multi-cam sequences where we've disabled the A CAM but kept the B CAM but want both in archive). Queues a render with a prores4444 w/alpha preset and appends "-zv01" to the filename (becomes: sequence_name-e41-AJR-zv01.mov)
Repeat for Video Track 1; sequence_name-e41-AJR-zv02.mov
For audio; same-same, mute all tracks except the first, select and export a wave: sequence_name-e41-AJR-za01.wav

You now have the "z" tag sorted at the bottom of the list, sorted by audio or video tracks. A future editor 6 months from now can just grab these clean exports of the timeline and use "Scene Edit Detect" to create cuts or Subclips of the rendered "layers" and rebuild the edit without ever needing the open up the original prproj. Highly useful for future cut-downs, etc.

So the Q is — can I make Excalibur do all of this now with a series of commands? Or am I missing some steps (like enable only the disabled clips)?

Sir_Ivan

Great question!
Well, it is possible, though Excalibur is not smart enough to take arguments and perform operations based on that (e.g. quantity of selected clips or in your case, number of video and audio tracks), yet. But you still can make it work, here is a user command (I know, I need to make possibility to export and share user commands...😔):

Duplicate and Increment. Name: #SEQ-STEMS
Select All Disabled Clips
Keyboard Shortcut: Timelines (the one that focuses on timeline panel. Just found that mistake, after "Duplicate and Increment" timeline focus is lost, so this shortcut press is to fix that)
Keyboard Shortcut: Enable Clips
Mute Video Tracks: Mute All tracks
Mute Audio Tracks: Mute All tracks
Mute Video Tracks. Toggle Tracks, Tracks: 1
Export Media. Name: #SEQ-zv01 (you will get SEQNAME-STEMS-zv01, because now sequence have STEMS added to its name)
Mute Video Tracks. Toggle Tracks, Tracks: 1,2 (1 will be muted, 2 will be unmuted)
Export Media. Name: #SEQ-zv02

...
and you get the idea. Here is a gif of a test:

Sir_Ivan

Based on the difficulties I had, here is what I think I need to add for future updates:

simple programming tools (already on my list):
loop, arguments and simple math operations
possibility to make operations on text strings (trim, replace). E.g. to trim out STEMS.

Overall though, your question made me feel good about Excalibur! 😅

adamjrichman

Awesome! Excited to try and play with this! Thanks for the demo! 🙌