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Interesting notes about fcpx plugins
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[Jeremy Garchow] “All I can reference is Apple’s existing UI. There are custom controls. Perhaps they aren’t available to developers yet (or maybe they won’t be, I don’t know, I don’t develop plugins)
Look at the keyer and luma keyer.
Look at the Color Board with the masks and various tools that you step through (Exposure, Saturation, Board, etc).”True, but manufacturers can and do violate their own APIs. They do it all the time. Yes, the keyer would be an example, but the Color Board isn’t as this is a “mode” (IMHO) and not a plug-in. Remember also that in FCP “classic” the keyers and color correctors were custom one-offs, which Apple integrated for that purpose. They didn’t match anything else in the GUI. All I can tell you is what developers have point blank told me. That is, there is no plug-in architecture within FCP X itself and that they can’t do custom controls in the UI. Maybe that will change.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think so, but the key word there is “might.” A developer working on a plugin today doesn’t care about “might” — they care about “does” or “does not.”
Sadly for FCPX users, right now it’s “does not.” Hopefully that will change. (Optimism?)”
Let me ask you this. Does the Red Giant video convey pessimism or optimism in a general sense?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Does the Red Giant video convey pessimism or optimism in a general sense?”
Trick question 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “True, but manufacturers can and do violate their own APIs. They do it all the time. Yes, the keyer would be an example, but the Color Board isn’t as this is a “mode” (IMHO) and not a plug-in. “
It’s true. It is on every clip and not selectable like filters.
[Oliver Peters] “All I can tell you is what developers have point blank told me. That is, there is no plug-in architecture within FCP X itself and that they can’t do custom controls in the UI. Maybe that will change.”
One can only hope of such optimistic optimismal options.
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[Oliver Peters] “Trick question ;-)”
Fair enough!
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Oliver, you are correct. Apple has not allowed us (developers) to use custom interface elements in the inspector in FCP X. This is true even thought their own internal effects (eg the color correction tool and the keyer) use custom UI elements in the inspector.
The solution that Apple seems to want everyone to take is to implement on screen controls instead. It would be possible for color wheels to be implemented as onscreen controls, thats the only way of doing it so far.
Our latest release of CoreMelt V2 plugins uses on screen controls to access the help documentation, our registration tool and plugin presets.
Roger
CoreMelt–
CoreMelt V2 plugins -
[Roger Bolton] “Oliver, you are correct. Apple has not allowed us (developers) to use custom interface elements in the inspector in FCP X. This is true even thought their own internal effects (eg the color correction tool and the keyer) use custom UI elements in the inspector.
The solution that Apple seems to want everyone to take is to implement on screen controls instead. It would be possible for color wheels to be implemented as onscreen controls, thats the only way of doing it so far.
Our latest release of CoreMelt V2 plugins uses on screen controls to access the help documentation, our registration tool and presets.”
Roger, thanks so much for writing, it’s nice to hear from a developer.
If you care to comment, I have a few questions.
Is this “new” method limiting? Is it worse? Better? Just different? All together useless?
What about what Walter mentioned about stacking effects, what happens then?
Does the UI show up in the scopes?
Are the on screen controls “floating” or are they locked to the viewer dimensions?
Sorry if any of this sounds silly.
Thanks again for writing.
Jeremy
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Personally I disagree with Apple’s design decision on this. In Motion 4 and Motion 5 both custom controls and on screen controls are supported. The developer can choose which is more appropriate depending on the type of control. FCP 7 supported custom controls but not on screen controls.
So in FCP X, they gave us OSC in FCP (great), but took away custom controls (bad). In practise this means every developer has to redesign a product to work specifically for FCP X to use only OSC and not rely at all on custom controls since all other plugin hosts (Motion / AE / Premiere Pro etc) support custom controls in inspector hosts.
On screen controls are great for some types of effects, like the two point rotation and direction controls that Apple uses in their own inbuilt effects.
The problem with purely OSC is that really on screen controls are only appropriate for spatial controls or color curves, while there’s many other type of controls that could be created. Also you can only see one on screen control at a time, where you can have multiple plugins parameters visible at once. IMO, this is just one more indication of the “non-pro” nature of FCP X, it’s designed purely for low-intermediate level editors and its assumed that FCP X editors will not be doing complex effects work on the timeline.
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CoreMelt V2 plugins -
[Roger Bolton] “Also you can only see one on screen control at a time, where you can have multiple plugins parameters visible at once. IMO, this is just one more indication of the “non-pro” nature of FCP X, it’s designed purely for low-intermediate level editors and its assumed that FCP X editors will not be doing complex effects work on the timeline.
“Naturally custom UI should be allowed! But to view multiple on-screen controls – how would that work?
How would you select which control (i.e. plugin) to manipulate if all are visible at the same time?
I might be thinking in old-school After Effects terminology here since that’s my main environment,
but doesn’t it make sense to view only the on-screen controls for a selected plugin?
However, if you could gang controls between plug-ins – as with expressions in AE-
it could be cool to see one on-screen control affecting another.regards
.-daniel -
[Daniel Annefelt] “I might be thinking in old-school After Effects terminology here since that’s my main environment,
but doesn’t it make sense to view only the on-screen controls for a selected plugin?”I’d say that on-screen controls aren’t the best way to encourage developers to allow their users to adjust their images.
If you allow multiple OSCs, you’ll quickly run out of real estate with a complicated effects stack. If you can only see one OSC at a time, you can’t easily make multi-effect adjustments in context; you much change your selection each time.
Contrast this with After Effects, which generally encourages developers to either keep controls off-screen altogether, or expose any on-screen controls as standard controls in the effects panel. You can see all the controls for all your effects simultaneously in the effects panel, eliminating the need to specifically select an effect before seeing or adjusting its settings.
FCPX has its effects tab, but if developers can’t put the controls they need there, it’s reduced to effects selection only.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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