Animation and Batching Node category

It occurred to me today that batching built into FF would be handy. This of course isn't a new idea but I was thinking it would be even better if it were implemented as a variety of nodes in the editor so you could step through animation tasks and batching tasks however you wished.
I feel this would keep the program streamlined and extend it's current feature set to allow for a wealth of new filter capabilities. It would also resolve the lack of animation and batching features in FF and handle a much greater variety of needs for those types of filters while only requiring a few nodes to pull it off.

I'm not entirely certain how it would work but I do have a few examples for some nodes and components that it could implement to start things off. This is a very rough draft of the idea however so bear that in mind

I am interested in hearing what everyone else thinks about the idea as well. Please feel free to leave any thoughts or additional node ideas you might have.

Firstly though, I think any filter that uses these nodes would need to have an additional save option. So instead of just "Save Image As..." it would also include "Save Sequence". This would probably also require some type of way to dictate the start and end point of a sequence, though I'm not certain right now how that should work. Additionally I would suggest that it use the FFBatch Renderer for overall efficiency.

For animations, a node that takes a user input and steps through it with various settings. For example you could connect an angle input and then step through the degrees one at a time or have an offset so it steps through two at a time or 10 etc. and probably delegate the number of overall steps. Likely this could be expanded to have even more options and there should be one for each input type. (color, curve, numerical, etc.)

For animations, an output node that dictates the end of an iteration. For this I'm thinking you would need to declare all the image settings when you initially "Save Sequence" such as image format etc. Additionally this node would probably require an input that tells it the file name to use and an input that gives it an iterator for the files.

For batching, a node that efficiently uses another optional filter preset. It's worth noting that I'm suggesting a preset over the filter itself to avoid stacking piles of settings up. It's easy enough to make a new preset if needed. This would allow for chains of filters to be easily applied to images.

For batching, a node that takes a folder of images as it's input. I'm not really certain if it would need anything other than that. Maybe someone would like it to have a declarable start and end or offset to do every other image or something but that seems a bit much to ask.

Well, that's all I have for now. Hopefully you guys have more ideas to add to this.

Fingers crossed that we actually see this implemented

Ya I've looked at all those and use the gui tool from aba quite often actually. I just feel that this should be built into the software and supported out of the box. Also, using this method would allow for a much larger set of options than any of the current solutions could offer, depending on the number of nodes created for it, and it allows for future expansion further down the road.

I won't disagree that these could slow down filters that use them, and very likely would slow them down to some degree. I don't see how it would slow down FF as a whole though, if the filter doesn't use these nodes it shouldn't be affected by them. It would be like any other node set for a filter, if used in excess or incorrectly it could drastically increase the time to render.

At the same time however if you consider the time it would require to manually do what these nodes would offer it seems like a fair trade-off to use them in exchange for a little extra time per render and if they were to automatically make use of the batch renderer that would save a good deal of time over the preview renderer for each iteration.

Overall it just offers more creative freedom to those who would like to make use of it and further extends FF's usefulness and feature set. Much like the new loops feature did, there isn't a need for every filter to make use of loops but for those that need to it's very useful and possibly an indispensable feature.

Is there any update on "animation" possibilities?
A support for After-Effects would be awesome.

What would be possible could be seen on apps like Artmatic ( http://uisoftware.com/artmatic/indexAMVY.php ) which even goes much further. Unfortunately OS X only.