Placeholder for a not yet created file?

[Simma]

I'm trying to write a script that works with our render farm and it's going quite good after reading a lot of posts on this forum. But now I'm stuck on something. I want the rendered out file to be imported back into the project, just like when using Post Render Actions in the Output settings. But I can't use those as I go through a render farm, save my project to another name before the render is done etc. So is there any way to create a placeholder in AE that refer to a path, but the files hasn't been created yet. As the files render complete, the placeholder updates automatically. I found something called AVItem footageMissing attribute in the scripting guide, but I'm unsure if that's the correct thing. Anyone have any ideas regarding this?

[scribling]

How about making a dummy 2 frames of your footage to be imported (so that it's a sequence);
Import it;
Delete the dummy footage so that in AE it becomes "missing footage;"
Render the first comp that will replace the dummy footage;
When the second comp renders it will now find the missing footage and render normally.

[Simma]

Yeah, I have been playing with a simular idea where a new render replaces the temp files. But then they would need to have the exact same names, and wouldn't that be very hard to get working? The actual names wouldn't be a problem as I could just rename them as the output filename in the render que, but how about the actual frame numbers? In the render que it just says [####] for example, and I would need them to be exactly the same, right? Was hoping that there might be an easier soultion. Hm.

[ajk48n]

You can change the [#####] with this:

var framePath = path.replace(/%5B.*%5D/g, pad(first_frame, 5));

function pad(numNumber, numLength){
var strString = '' + numNumber;
while(strString.length<numLength){
strString = '0' + strString;
}
return strString;
}

it will change the "[#####]" into whatever first_frame is set, padded with 0's