Using the attached composition, use the arrow keys to advance the movie. at fractional time steps One gets what looks like difference frames. In my view, the “Play Movie” node should always deliver a valid image.
No
Instead of Play Movie, the Step Movie Frame node would be the better one to use for this purpose, and would avoid the problem you’re seeing. (Another related node is Decode Movie Image.)
Although our team doesn’t disagree that the Play Movie output is incorrect in this case, considering that it’s an edge case that is not really the intended usage of the node, we’re going to close this bug report so we can focus on higher priority bugs.
As it happens the same problem occurs with “Decode movie image”.
It also occurs with “Step Movie Frame”.
Sorry, you’re right. When we initially tested, we saw that Step Movie Frame worked much better for this movie, but overlooked that it did still generate some gray frames. I’ve reopened the bug report.
As a workaround I can suggest converting the video to a different format that doesn’t use interframe compression, such as ProRes or MJPEG (a.k.a. “Photo JPEG”).
