⚋ Frame Counter (Directory)

Long animations take hours, and hours means crashes. The whole reason Frame Counter (Directory) [Dream] exists is that your place in the animation should be a fact about the disk, not a number living in a node that resets when ComfyUI restarts. It counts the frames already rendered in a folder and turns that count into a FRAME_COUNTER - so an interrupted render resumes from the next frame instead of starting over.

It's one of the frame-counter family in the Dream Project Animation Nodes pack (alt-key-project), the 2023 Deforum-style animation toolkit. The pack isn't maintained anymore, but the directory-backed counter is still one of the cleanest "resume my render" ideas in the ecosystem.

How it works

You give it:

• directory_path and pattern (default *) - where to look
• indexing - numeric reads the trailing digits from filenames (shot_0123.png → 123); alphabetic order numbers files by sort order
• total_frames (INT, default 100) and frames_per_second (INT, default 30) - the animation's size and speed, which get baked into the counter

The output is a single frame_counter whose current frame is derived from how many image files already exist (plus one - it's positioned at the next frame to render). It also detects the pack's batch_0001-style subfolders, so it plays nice with Image Sequence Saver's layout.

The important side effect: because the position comes from files on disk, it's stable across restarts, graph edits, and queue interruptions. That's the property you're actually paying for.

Where it shines

• Resumable renders: crash at frame 340, relaunch, and the counter is already at 341.
• Appending to existing animations: want to continue a sequence you generated last week? Point it at the folder and it picks up where the files end.
• Scripted / headless runs where nobody's around to babysit a primitive.

The trade-off: it's only as good as your filename scheme. If your files aren't numbered predictably, numeric indexing will miscount. Keep your renderer writing zero-padded, trailing-digit filenames and you're golden.

Installing

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/alt-key-project/comfyui-dream-project.git

Or via ComfyUI Manager under "Dream Project Animation". No model downloads; the pack's deps are imageio, scipy, torchvision, pilgram, and evalidate. As always with this pack, watch the numpy<2.0 pin. Find it under Dream → animation.