Exporting tracker from flame

[ricardo]

Does anybody know what is the fomat that I need to export from the flame tracker to bring it into Silhouette. The options are Setup, Track or Shift. I tried Track and changed the extension to .txt (flame puts .ascii) but Silhouette didn't like it. Thanks for any responses.

[jbills]

Howdy, ricardo - silhouette EXPORTS it's trackers to a variety of different formats, but it's not the same with IMPORTING. Silhouette imports it's own "simple" format only, which is used to pass around silhouette trackers from other sessions.

I'm not quite sure why they don't import other formats - there might be some legality or licensing issue. We had our in-house coders write us an importer for shake trackers, which was fairly simple for them but I'm not sure if I could have done it myself. So perhaps someday someone will write a discreet one that they'll share.

until then, I can share a recipe to do this with a spreadsheet editor. It's not pretty, but it works.

Generate a tracker file from silhouette with the # of tracker's you want to bring in. Just run out a dummy file. If you have 2 tracks in flame, run out two tracks in silhouette with the same frame range. just to give yourself a base to work with.

Export the silhouette track to the simple format

copy and paste the tracking coordinate columns of this file into a spreadsheet program (like MS Excel). it will break the values up into their own respective columns.

go to this webpage:
http://www.heimlich.net/trackconvert/

convert your discreet track to an after effects track. AE uses the same separation and zero point as silhouette.

Now copy and paste the columns of your new AE (was flame) tracker file into another page of the spreadsheet editor. Then, simply copy over the x/y values from your flame/AE page and overwrite the ones on the silhouette page.

copy/paste the results of this back into the silhouette tracker text file that you made, overwriting the dummy values. Then read that into silhouette - bam, flame track in Silhouette.