Load Asset

Requirements

Input Streams: None

Output Streams: Mesh stream, texture stream, animation stream, audio stream, stabilization data (depending on contents of the source clip)

Overview

The Load Asset stage introduces new clip data to the current track as mesh and texture streams.

Load Asset intervals take an Asset ID for the clip to be loaded, and an offset to determine when in the composition the streams are played.

Load Asset Stages support a special workflow for adding Clips: New tracks with Load Asset stages are created automatically when you click and drag a clip from the Project panel onto the Track Editor.

Additionally, you can add a configured Load Asset interval by clicking and dragging a clip onto the Timeline section adjacent to a Load Asset stage, or you can add a new Load Asset stage to an existing track by clicking and dragging onto the Track View.

Note

Because of the click and drag workflows, you typically won’t ever need to manually edit the parameters in a Load Asset stage.

Standard Parameters

  • Excluded Streams: This dropdown allows you to choose one or more stream types from the clip to exclude from this Load Asset stage. This way, when you import multiple streams in a single clip (such as textures and audio in a single video, or meshes and textures in separate file sequences) you can choose to add only some of that data to the composition. To exclude a type of data, select an interval in your Load Asset stage, then expand the Excluded Streams dropdown to reveal each stream in the current clip. Select an item to exclude that data stream, or select an excluded item to include it. Multiple data streams can be excluded by selecting one after another.

Two additional parameters are provided for advanced configuration. Typically, clips should be added to Load Asset stages by dragging your clip from the Project panel onto the Timeline or track, rather than through setting these values directly

  • AssetID: This specifies the loaded clip. To change the Asset ID, click and drag a clip from the Project panel into your Load Asset stage’s asset ID field

  • Clip Offset: This sets the offset of the interval in ticks. Each tick is one 200th of a frame.

Audio Parameters

Audio parameters are displayed at the bottom of the inspector. Audio parameters are only visible when an interval containing audio data is selected.

  • Volume (db): The volume in decibels of the audio track.

  • Fade In Length (s): Set a fade in length in seconds. Starting at the beginning of the interval, audio will linearly fade in for this many seconds. Accepts fractional inputs, like 0.05.

  • Fade Out Length (s): Set a fade out length in seconds. Starting this many seconds before the end of the interval, audio will linearly fade out until the end of the interval. Accepts fractional inputs, like 0.05.

Working with Load Asset

Each new track in a composition will begin with a Load Asset stage to load a new clip for editing, and depending on the needs of your project you may use more Load Asset stages later on to add in extra clip data or re-introduce data that has been edited outside of HoloEdit, such as using a Load Asset stage to update textures that were modified in external software.

If you need to manually configure a Load Asset, keep in mind that new Load Asset stages have the ‘clip offset’ value set to 0. This means that if you add a clip to that Load Asset stage, any timing information in the clip will correspond directly to time duration of any individual interval.

For example, if your clip starts at frame 70, any interval frames 0-70 will not contain your data. Increasing the clip offset will shift the clip backwards, until at a value of 14000 the 70th clip-frame would be the first frame in the interval.

Note

Streams loaded from Load Asset stages replace any existing samples of the same type present higher in a track, but otherwise Load Asset stages are additive.

For example, to produce a textured mesh, you could load a clip containing both textures and meshes, or you could load two separate clips – one with meshes, and one with textures – via two load asset stages.

If you wish to pass through some data from earlier in the track that would typically be replaced by your Load Asset stage, take advantage of the Excluded Streams parameter to filter out certain data from your clip.