March 2009 - Pro-apps-dev - lists.apple.com

Re: Viewer Window and Display preprocessing
by Darrin Cardani 20 Mar '09

20 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com That should keep all instances in synch with one another. Darrin On Mar 19, 2009, at 5:00 PM, Brian Gardner wrote: Thanks. That's what I was hoping. Should I just set that via my FxPlug's parameter UI? Or is there a proper, sanctioned place for this type global parameter to be set? (e.g.: a Preferences panel or something similar) Thank you very much for your help. -- Brian On Mar 19, 2009, at 4:47 PM, Darrin Cardani wrote: On Mar 19, 2009, at 3:55 PM, Brian Gardner wrote: Hmmm.... 1. Is there any way an FxPlugin could read a Global variable? I'm thinking, perhaps, a user settable toggle whose state all instances of a FxPlug could access? static SomeClass* mySingleton = nil; SomeClass* getMySingleton () { if (mySingleton == nil) { mySingleton = [[SomeClass alloc] init]; } return mySingleton; } Darrin -- Darrin Cardani dcardani(a)apple.com -- Darrin Cardani dcardani(a)apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… It's hard to say how you should handle it, as I don't exactly know what you're trying to do with it. But here's one idea: 1) In your plugin, include a custom parameter that will display and control the global data 2) Have each plugin instance subscribe to notifications from the singleton object 3) Whenever the user adjusts the custom parameter in one instance, update the singleton and have the singleton notify any listeners 4) When the listeners are notified, they update their UI to match the current state of the singleton You can create a singleton object that the others will communicate with. For example, you could have something like this: (Note that I didn't actually compile that! But that should give you an idea of how to do it.) This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Viewer Window and Display preprocessing
by Brian Gardner 20 Mar '09

20 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=dk20050327; d=earthlink.net; b=kJZBedxSrFGS/ybPcv9fGIpVTGTeEHLNNMZq0eeafhtGHqSHosldGWcSpTHRWoWT; h=Received:From:To:In-Reply-To:Subject:References:Message-Id:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Mime-Version:Date:Cc:X-Mailer:X-ELNK-Trace:X-Originating-IP; Thanks. That's what I was hoping. Should I just set that via my FxPlug's parameter UI? Or is there a proper, sanctioned place for this type global parameter to be set? (e.g.: a Preferences panel or something similar) Thank you very much for your help. -- Brian On Mar 19, 2009, at 4:47 PM, Darrin Cardani wrote: On Mar 19, 2009, at 3:55 PM, Brian Gardner wrote: Hmmm.... 1. Is there any way an FxPlugin could read a Global variable? I'm thinking, perhaps, a user settable toggle whose state all instances of a FxPlug could access? static SomeClass* mySingleton = nil; SomeClass* getMySingleton () { if (mySingleton == nil) { mySingleton = [[SomeClass alloc] init]; } return mySingleton; } Darrin -- Darrin Cardani dcardani(a)apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… You can create a singleton object that the others will communicate with. For example, you could have something like this: (Note that I didn't actually compile that! But that should give you an idea of how to do it.) This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Viewer Window and Display preprocessing
by Darrin Cardani 19 Mar '09

19 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com On Mar 19, 2009, at 3:55 PM, Brian Gardner wrote: Hmmm.... 1. Is there any way an FxPlugin could read a Global variable? I'm thinking, perhaps, a user settable toggle whose state all instances of a FxPlug could access? static SomeClass* mySingleton = nil; SomeClass* getMySingleton () { if (mySingleton == nil) { mySingleton = [[SomeClass alloc] init]; } return mySingleton; } Darrin -- Darrin Cardani dcardani(a)apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… You can create a singleton object that the others will communicate with. For example, you could have something like this: (Note that I didn't actually compile that! But that should give you an idea of how to do it.) This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Viewer Window and Display preprocessing
by Brian Gardner 19 Mar '09

19 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=dk20050327; d=earthlink.net; b=VoIKSs4WB80z+hQiuqItL7aqI0EhtA8ZMeghH+DCtnW+ViinQ7LI4BnaQOXBHiDg; h=Received:From:To:In-Reply-To:Subject:References:Message-Id:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Mime-Version:Date:Cc:X-Mailer:X-ELNK-Trace:X-Originating-IP; Hmmm.... 1. Is there any way an FxPlugin could read a Global variable? I'm thinking, perhaps, a user settable toggle whose state all instances of a FxPlug could access? 2. Thanks for the link to the FxPlug API page. Would you happen to know if there is a tutorial available for FxPlug programming? Maybe even one that teaches writing hardware accellerated FxPlugins? The nesting idea sounds interesting. Programming it to be realtime sounds puzzling. Though, that might be overcome, if I could find a way to learn GPU FxPlug programming quickly enough. Any suggestions? -- Brian On Mar 19, 2009, at 1:47 PM, Paul Schneider wrote: Hi Brian, So, you can get close, but there aren't any "display LUT" hooks. If you're interested, the FxPlug SDK is here: http://developer.apple.com/appleapplications/fxplugsdk.html - Paul _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… You can make an image processing filter and apply it to your project (using groups in Motion, or nesting in FCP). But the filter is part of the project, not attached to a particular viewer. The user will need to remember to switch it off when viewing your project on a different display, or when you render / export to a file on disk. And there isn't any FxPlug API to detect when you are being called for display in the viewer, versus the canvas, versus exporting to disk. So, you can't do that automatically in your plugin. This email sent to pschneider(a)apple.com This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Viewer Window and Display preprocessing
by Paul Schneider 19 Mar '09

19 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com Hi Brian, So, you can get close, but there aren't any "display LUT" hooks. If you're interested, the FxPlug SDK is here: http://developer.apple.com/appleapplications/fxplugsdk.html - Paul On Mar 19, 2009, at 3:38 PM, Darrin Cardani wrote: On Mar 19, 2009, at 11:30 AM, Brian Gardner wrote: Can we write plugins for a viewer? 1. For example, if I have a special preview monitor, can I process the video image before it is displayed? 2. Alternatively, can process the image going to the canvas viewer window before that image is displayed? Darrin -- Darrin Cardani dcardani(a)apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/pschneider%40apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… You can make an image processing filter and apply it to your project (using groups in Motion, or nesting in FCP). But the filter is part of the project, not attached to a particular viewer. The user will need to remember to switch it off when viewing your project on a different display, or when you render / export to a file on disk. And there isn't any FxPlug API to detect when you are being called for display in the viewer, versus the canvas, versus exporting to disk. So, you can't do that automatically in your plugin. (process the video after it's gone from the timeline and the before it appears in the display, so that I can adjust it for the specialty display) Where could I find more info on how to do this? Just so I understand - are you trying to do something like apply a device-specific look up table to the output? If so, you can do something like this in Motion. You would write an FxPlug that does the conversion, and simply apply it to a group containing your entire project. In FCP, I'm not positive, but could you make a nested sequence and apply a filter to the nested sequence? This email sent to pschneider(a)apple.com This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Viewer Window and Display preprocessing
by Darrin Cardani 19 Mar '09

19 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com On Mar 19, 2009, at 11:30 AM, Brian Gardner wrote: Can we write plugins for a viewer? 1. For example, if I have a special preview monitor, can I process the video image before it is displayed? 2. Alternatively, can process the image going to the canvas viewer window before that image is displayed? Darrin -- Darrin Cardani dcardani(a)apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… (process the video after it's gone from the timeline and the before it appears in the display, so that I can adjust it for the specialty display) Where could I find more info on how to do this? Just so I understand - are you trying to do something like apply a device-specific look up table to the output? If so, you can do something like this in Motion. You would write an FxPlug that does the conversion, and simply apply it to a group containing your entire project. In FCP, I'm not positive, but could you make a nested sequence and apply a filter to the nested sequence? This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Viewer Window and Display preprocessing
by Brian Gardner 19 Mar '09

19 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=dk20050327; d=earthlink.net; b=KJPGKMQuG3NkKdBAITus1JsmFcOWlMPUnD4mUPUcG9QwXNIhkUstJ5zY842fFWoM; h=Received:Message-Id:From:To:In-Reply-To:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Subject:Mime-Version:Date:References:X-Mailer:X-ELNK-Trace:X-Originating-IP; Can we write plugins for a viewer? 1. For example, if I have a special preview monitor, can I process the video image before it is displayed? 2. Alternatively, can process the image going to the canvas viewer window before that image is displayed? Where could I find more info on how to do this? -- Brian _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… (process the video after it's gone from the timeline and the before it appears in the display, so that I can adjust it for the specialty display) This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: FCP plugin memory usage
by Steve Christensen 17 Mar '09

17 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com On Mar 17, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Paul Miller wrote: _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… If your plugin maintains a lot of data that can be regenerated if necessary, the best thing to do is to use the singleton approach to manage the memory across multiple instances of your plugin. Of course, this breaks down if the user has multiple instances of plugins from multiple vendors, each implementing their own static pool of scratch memory. But it does greatly contain the problem. Can a plugin subscribe to NSTimer events, or would that be no-no? If so, a plugin could set up a periodic timer and flush caches every x minutes of inactivity or something. Though I don't know if this would play nicely with your real-time stuff. Cache flushes will make the plugin behave in a very non-realtime manner, but if the alternative is to have FCP VM thrashing, or crashing, then I'll take the performance hit over data loss. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: FCP plugin memory usage
by Steve Christensen 17 Mar '09

17 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com On Mar 17, 2009, at 7:11 AM, Paul Miller wrote: _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… Steve Christensen wrote: On the first call to renderOutput:... my plugin loads an external image file to use as part of its effect. Since render performance would outright suck if I loaded the image and then tossedit after rendering each frame, I keep the image in memory and dispose of it in the plugin's dealloc method. While doing some testing I noticed that instances of my plugin get created as it is associated with a clip but don't get deallocated until either the project containing the clip is closed or FCP quits. This suggests that if there are enough clips using my plugin, for example, then application memory could get tight. Based on my understanding of the FxPlug API, there doesn't appear to be a way to determine that rendering is really done, or at least the plugin won't be needed "soon." Does this mean I have to hope that a user doesn't overload FCP's memory and cause a crash? It's possible your undeleted clips are in FCP's undo buffer, and will eventually get deleted when the undo buffer overflows. I'm just guessing. I suggest you share your loaded image data between all instances of your filter using some kind of singleton/shared data approach. The image data, in the worst case, is different for every plugin instance so sharing doesn't necessarily improve the situation. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: FCP plugin memory usage
by Steve Christensen 17 Mar '09

17 Mar '09

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com On Mar 17, 2009, at 7:36 AM, Paul Schneider wrote: On Mar 17, 2009, at 9:25 AM, Steve Christensen wrote: That's what I thought, at least regarding the SDK. On Mar 17, 2009, at 7:10 AM, Paul Schneider wrote: On Mar 17, 2009, at 1:57 AM, Steve Christensen wrote: _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a… For this particular case, the per-plugin big chunk o' memory is an image of arbitrary size. I already play games by just using a bitmap representation and scaling larger images down to something more manageable, trading off image quality against memory usage (which also improves rendering performance). If FCP were to keep only those plugin instances that are being used (however that's defined), that would help to decrease the memory pressure, but plugins might still have to handle the case of running on older versions of FCP. The more problematic thing for my case, though, is that FCP seems to be keeping plugin instances allocated permanently, even if a particular clip hasn't been touched anytime recently. FCP may do some periodic deallocation of less recently-used instances but I didn't see that happening. That's true. We could periodically deallocate plugin instances for clips that haven't been recently touched, but we don't currently. That might help for plugins that maintain a lot of temporary or cache memory, but it wouldn't do much for plugins that maintain a lot of persistent memory, perhaps in custom parameters. If your plugin maintains a lot of data that can be regenerated if necessary, the best thing to do is to use the singleton approach to manage the memory across multiple instances of your plugin. Of course, this breaks down if the user has multiple instances of plugins from multiple vendors, each implementing their own static pool of scratch memory. But it does greatly contain the problem. The more problematic thing for my case, though, is that FCP seems to be keeping plugin instances allocated permanently, even if a particular clip hasn't been touched anytime recently. FCP may do some periodic deallocation of less recently-used instances but I didn't see that happening. We've discussed the need for better communication with plugins: - howMuchMemoryAreYouUsing, -pleaseTossAnyCacheMemory, that kind of thing. Right now, there's nothing in the SDK in that area. For now, you'll have to manage memory yourself. One strategy might be to keep a static array of images around, that all instances of your plugin share. You can cap the size of the array to some reasonable size (5, 10, etc). That way, if a user adds multiple instances of your plugin that point to different images, you can toss the least-recently-used image as you add a new one. If the many instances of your plugin can share the same images, even better. That's probably the best thing to do until we allow better communication between plugins and hosts with regard to resource management. On the first call to renderOutput:... my plugin loads an external image file to use as part of its effect. Since render performance would outright suck if I loaded the image and then tossedit after rendering each frame, I keep the image in memory and dispose of it in the plugin's dealloc method. While doing some testing I noticed that instances of my plugin get created as it is associated with a clip but don't get deallocated until either the project containing the clip is closed or FCP quits. This suggests that if there are enough clips using my plugin, for example, then application memory could get tight. Based on my understanding of the FxPlug API, there doesn't appear to be a way to determine that rendering is really done, or at least the plugin won't be needed "soon." Does this mean I have to hope that a user doesn't overload FCP's memory and cause a crash? This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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