thumbnailer

Prior to the built in support in Nuke 6.3, I found myself in a particularly bad situation of having several Read nodes in my script that were camera RAW images.  That said, I found each time I changed frames, Nuke would get stuck in the mud as it had to load whatever 5k RAW files were visible in the DAG, rendering computer useless for several seconds while the RAWs were loaded & processed - and this wasn't at all for display in the viewer, this was literally just to update the little postage stamp in the DAG!  Yikes!

This script was created to fix the problem and since putting it into use, I've been pleasantly surprised at the speed up to ALL of my scripts (even ones without RAW inputs) as a result and I've made it a part of my general workflow.  I never realized how much unnecessary network traffic the Read nodes visible in the DAG created until now.

Kudos to Frank R for the help in putting this together, and Chris M & Bernhard K for help "nailing" it. Credit to Shake & Katana for the original idea, as this is basically how they dealt with thumbnail generation.

Invoking this script will do the following:

1) find all Read nodes in your selection or if no selection will run on your whole script

2) disable the postage stamp for each Read

3) create a Framehold node for each read, w/postage stamp set to the current frame.  Finally it will name the framehold appropriately after the read node and position it directly above the aforementioned Read.

If you would like to use a different "poster frame" then just change the frame # in the corresponding framehold node.  As you expand your script and add in new Reads, you can simply run this script at any time to catch the new reads that still have the default Nuke postage stamp and change them to a single frame "thumbnailed" version.

Hope others find it useful.

This is more or less obsolete in Nuke 6.3, since the put in the "static" preference for postage stamps.