On Jun 16, 2008, at 11:26 AM, Darrin Cardani wrote: On Jun 14, 2008, at 7:41 AM, Andreas Kiel wrote: I used the Apple generator example to create text tracks for quite a long time.
This way you create one "master" generator with an "effect id = 'xxx'" and only write the changes into the XML for the "childs".
This works fine and has the advantage that you can change "master" settings in a second, which will be applied to all following generators.
I and my customers (which I had been in contact with) in the last time only worked on smaller (amount of title) projects, but now some bigger came up with 1000 titles and way more.
And here we got an issue: the XML import takes a real (I mean real) long time. That wasn't the case with elder versions of FCP, though I can't proof when this started.
Using the "non optimized way" which means writing the full generator each time reduces the import time by factor 10, 20 or more.
The disadvantage is that you can't do global changes any more in that kind of speed as with the "optimized way", means that you cannot - even as an "know nothing about XML user" - open the XML in TextEditor and change one entry in the "master" and all children will follow. Same as with an app that would do it for you.
creating the XML and file size isn't an issue though.
Does anybody have thoughts about this?
Helena?:)
Andreas, I don't know if this is the best way to handle this, or if it would even solve your problem. Could you create and then use a Motion template for your titles? One other option would be to just generate a Motion file with the text tracks and then generate your FCP file and have it reference the .motn file. The Motion file format is now publicly documented, so this shouldn't be too difficult. As I say, I don't know if that's the best solution, but might help with the problem you're seeing. Darrin -- Darrin Cardani email@hidden
Hey Andreas,
I believe you're saying: (and please correct me if I've gotten it wrong)
The user uses a text generator in multiple places in the FCP project. You have a tool that modifies the XML for each instance of the generator to make a change, let's say change the font. Working with small projects, this is fine... Working with projects with many more instances of the the text generator, however, proves to be slow since you have to modify each instance in the XML file.
So ideally you'd like to simply make the change (to the font, in my example) in one place and have that nicely propagate through-out the XML/project... perhaps leveraging the id attribute on effect node <effect id="foo">.
You're right, "id"s aren't used on effects today. Further, while "id" is allowed on <generatoritem>s, it doesn't override or re-use any <effect> speficications within. This latter issue being tracked as bug # 3467230, but having "id"s on <clipitem> and <generatoritem> doesn't make much sense since the item would just be re-edited at the same location on the timeline. So implementing id attributes on the effect level makes more sense. It would also allow for faster imports.
Apart from that, certainly Darrin's suggestion seems like the best solution. In the UI the motion templates address this issue since one can change attributes of the template across all uses in a sequence. So if you reference the same motion template in all the text generator instances, you can just change that motion template and all of the referencing generatoritems will be nicely updated.
Cheers, Helena
|