Background image sequence frame offset?

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hello all!

I did a search on this query and couldn’t find what I was looking for; but apologies if this is a re-post.

What I am trying to do is load a background image sequence to assist with some character animation I’m doing. The difficulty that I am having is that I need the sequence to begin playing on frame 50, not on frame 1. However, I can’t find any way to offset its play range. Is this possible?

I’ve thought if necessary I could create 50 blank frames to add to my sequence, but that seems rather memory wasteful.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers!
-Matt

To be clearer, what I am animating is happening at frame 50 and I need my reference background to play from frame 50 to frame 70 (my reference is 20 frames long), but when I load my reference as a background sequence it starts playing on frame 1 and ends on frame 20, so I need to offset its display 50 frames so it starts at frame 50.

#2

I believe you are looking for this:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/3D_interaction/Navigating/3D_View_Options

#3

Thanks for the link!

I did look at that, but did not understand that you had to load in a single image before the offset options became available. For those who are already familiar with this issue I’m sure that it is obvious. However, for someone still grappling with the complexities of Blender, it wasn’t intuitive.

I saw two buttons, one for an image, the other for movie (which includes image sequence) so it seemed logical to me that since I couldn’t load an image sequence with the still image button (it never occurred to me to load a single image and then look for more options from there) but could load an image sequence with the ‘movie’ button that the offset controls simply did not exist. I searched for ‘image sequence’ and background’ but found very little pertaining to my query.

I was told by Sergey Sharybin on the development team that the ‘movie’ button wasn’t fully implemented yet, hence no offset controls.

I think this is a good opportunity for me to create a beginner video tutorial for those new to using image sequences as reference in Blender 2.6+.

Again, thanks for the reply!

Cheers!
-Matt