arkennemasis Load Clips (finished clips from disk)

ArkLoadClips reads a run's finished clips back off disk as a VIDEO list, ready to feed straight into Video Assemble. It exists for the most maddening moment in a long video render: your assembly step died, or the machine rebooted at scene 9 of 12, and the clips are right there on disk - you just don't want to re-render the eight that are fine to get at the four that aren't. With this node, you don't.

It's the recovery half of the arkennemasis video chain. Hailuo Scene writes clips in scene order to a run folder; Load Clips reads them back as a list with the scene numbers intact, so Video Assemble can join a film whose render was interrupted without re-rendering a single frame.

How it works

The mechanism is a folder scan with a regex, and the details are where it gets clever:

• folder - the run folder (e.g. ComfyUI/output/nemasis/story_001), absolute or relative to the ComfyUI output directory.
• pattern - a regex a filename must match. The default is scene_(\d+)_\.mp4. The first capture group, if there is one, is the scene number and decides the order. No capture group? Files are ordered by natural filename sort instead. That single convention is what lets it reassemble a partial run in the right order no matter what got rendered.
• expected - 0 = accept whatever is there. Set it to the real count and a short run fails here, with a message naming the count, instead of quietly assembling an incomplete film. That's the "fail loudly at the right node" pattern - an incomplete film that looks complete is the worst outcome, and this node refuses to let you ship one by accident.

Two defensive details are worth knowing. Zero-byte files (a clip cut off mid-write) are skipped and logged rather than loaded broken. And IS_CHANGED returns a stamp of the folder's contents and mtimes, so re-running after more clips land re-reads the folder instead of serving a stale result from ComfyUI's cache - the "folder contents are the real input" trick.

Outputs: videos (a VIDEO list, ready for Video Assemble's list input) and report.

The workflow it enables

The canonical use: your multi-scene render died mid-way. You look at the run folder, count the clips, wire this node with folder pointing there and expected set to the real scene count. If the count matches, assemble. If it doesn't, Load Clips tells you exactly how many are missing before you waste an assembly on a film with a hole in it. Then re-render only the missing scenes into the same folder and run again.

Installing

It's part of comfyui-arkennemasis:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Hishamahmer/comfyui-arkennemasis
pip install replicate httpx

restart, under arkennemasis/Video. No models, no API calls - pure file handling.

The one trap: the regex. If your clips aren't named scene_000_.mp4 in that exact shape, the default pattern matches nothing and the node fails with a message naming the pattern. The good news is the failure is explicit, and the pattern is one field - matching your actual filename shape (e.g. clip_(\d+)\.mp4) is a two-second fix, and the capture group gives you back ordered assembly for free.