alexa classic .ARI raw files - image sequence grayed out??

[westonwoodbury]

Hey all, pretty straight forward question here. Shot a short with an older Alexa which kicks out .ARI files to external record. They are just an image sequence, been editing in Resolve and the image sequences worked immediately, showing up as clips, as expected. Need to do effects work now:

After Effects seems to not want to recognize them as image sequences.

Thoughts, suggestions??

Must be doing something wrong.. unsure how such as industry standard workflow and format would not be supported at this point.

Thanks, - W

[Mylenium]

Only select a single file. You may also need to move the XML sidecart file out of the way in case AE gets strung up on that.

Mylenium

[westonwoodbury]

Thanks. Good thought on the .XML

Tried and sadly it's still grayed out, exactly as pictured. 

I am only selecting 1 file. I'm used to the import process for .jpeg .tiff sequences etc and the like. 

I thought it might be something about the file/folder throwing it too, and even batch renamed the clips to get rid of the extra "." arri puts in the name, and the date field, just in case it was throwing off Adobe recognizing it as a sequence.

So weird. DR recognizes it like butter.

- W

[westonwoodbury]

Another experiment. If all I do is batch rename the extensions to .jpg, it suddenly works "ImporterJPEG Sequence" kicks in on the import dialogue.

Is it fair to assume Adobe somehow just doesn't have .ARI sequence support, even though it'll import single frames??

Have you imported these file types successfully before?

[Rick Gerard]

I went to Arri's sample footage site and downloaded some Alexa LF footage. Specifically the B003C001_180327_R1ZA.zip file. I found the same problem using the latest build of AE 2021 and AE Beta. Premiere Pro will open the footage, but I cannot import the footage as a sequence. You can copy and paste the footage from a Project folder in Premiere Pro to the Project Panel in After Effects or use Replace with After Effects Composition in a Premiere Pro sequence. It's kind of a bug but it will give you a way to get your shots into After Effects. 

I filed a bug.

(Edit) I explored things a little further and discovered that if I just ignored the warning in After Effects, the files imported just fine.  You just have to click a single image. The bug appears to be limited to the import panel that pops up.

[westonwoodbury]

Hmm. I had the same thought and I was NOT able to import .ARI sequences into Premiere. The import dialogue behaved the same way. In fact here, AE will import a single frame, just as you describe Premiere doing on your end.

I'm not sure what warning to ignore you are speaking of in AE. Or are you saying you also are importing the files individually, and not as a sequence?

[Rick Gerard]

Here's my workflow. I can't select the image sequence but the file gets imported as footage and it previews fairly quickly on my M1 Mac Mini that I bought for testing. Check the uploaded file.

[westonwoodbury]

Rick,

Gooooot it. OKAY.

I can verify the same bug exists on the Windows side. It will import as a sequence without an option to toggle it on the importer.

I didn't notice before before After Effects takes 3-4 seconds just to preview the frame you scrub to and that's at 2.8K. LOL. Shockingly slow. Funny how you get used to real time in other apps...

With the combo of these AE issues we've decided to do the visual effects on LogC ProRes4444XQ transcodes. So far so good.

Thanks much for the help in figuring this one out.

- W