On Jan 31, 2007, at 3:03 PM, Lawson English wrote:
Steve Christensen wrote:
On Jan 31, 2007, at 8:40 AM, Lawson English wrote:
Is there a documented way to use QC to roll your own video FX for
iMovie?
iMovie uses plug-ins to implements its various effect types. If
you wanted to use QC inside iMovie, you'd have to write a C, C++
or Obj-C plug-in that would control the QC composition. I've never
heard of a way to directly specify a QC composition in iMovie and
have it "just work."
Thanks for the response, but I don't think it is quite accurate.
I stand by what I said. The only official way to create iMovie
effects is via the iMovie SDK available on Apple's website.
When I dragged copies of the GC filters out of the iMovie HD.app
folder, I found consistent controls for the .qtz files showing up
in GC and apparently a consistent hierarchy of macros (2 sub-macros
were always present in the Effects_filters that I looked in). I
just haven't figured out if these are special custom interface
patches, or just a generic one with custom settings. Either way, it
looks to be possible to "roll my own" QC filters for iMovie HD, but
I was hoping that someone could give pointers as to how to proceed,
preferably "official" pointers.
Apple added a few QC compositions directly into iMovie with the
iMovie 6 release, but I don't believe that it looks for them anywhere
but inside the application bundle. So far they haven't released any
documentation on what's required to make a composition work within
iMovie.
Hopefully, with the next release of iLfie, QC, etc., this won't be
necessary, and a template for adding custom filters (at least) to
iMovie will be provided.
Well, that would be an iMovie decision, not a QC one since existing
compositions work just fine in the current iMovie release. At least
the ones they created.
Just adding a home-grown .qtz file (without any attempt at
providing the right interface) not only didn't work, but attempting
to use it eventually crashed iMovie, so obviously there's a
stability issue here. It would be kool if such filters could be
tweaked to work with Final Cut express/pro, of course.
There may be very strict requirements on what is and isn't allowed,
for whatever reason. Depending on what you were attempting, you just
may have been playing outside their sandbox.
