Export an image sequence

Numbered PNGs for VFX handoff or further compositing

When the next stop is a compositor, After Effects, Nuke, Fusion, you don't want a compressed video file. You want frames. ReelChest writes a PNG sequence with the same composition pipeline as a video export.

How it works

From the Export menu, under Frames, pick Image Sequence (PNG). You get a folder picker, not a file picker, pick where the sequence should land.

Inside that folder, ReelChest writes one PNG per frame:

frame_00001.png
frame_00002.png
frame_00003.png
…

5-digit, zero-padded. Lossless. Alpha supported. Every transform, every padding override, every Mosaic breath gap renders identically to a video export, the only difference is the container.

Why PNG and not JPEG

PNG keeps full precision and supports alpha. JPEG would lose precision on every cut, and you'd see it stacking up after a few rounds in a compositor. Disk space is cheap, recompression artefacts in a VFX pipeline are not.

Captions, here too

Same two modes as video.

• Burn in: captions render into each PNG using your chosen animation preset
• Sidecar: writes a .srt next to the folder

Burn-in into a sequence is uncommon (most VFX work happens before captions), but it works if you need a fully rendered draft.

Re-export

Image sequences write into a folder, and the PNGs inside use fixed names. Re-running the export into the same folder overwrites the existing frames. If you're iterating, point at a fresh folder for each pass.

PNG sequences look heavy on disk, and they are. The trade is that nothing downstream has to fight a codec to get clean pixels back.