Apple

From: Darrin Cardani <email@hidden>
To: Andrew Mees <email@hidden>
Cc: email@hidden
Sent: Friday, 27 March, 2009 21:44:23
Subject: Re: FxGenerator duration

Andrew,

Thanks! That's a really good example. It does have the same problems I mentioned to Brian with regards to the host app's interaction with the user when editing. But at least it gives me a realistic idea of when this would be needed.

As for your request - can you be more specific about this:

How about a call that returns to a generator an image buffer for the timeline at the given track and frame. Hoo boy, now that would be something worth writing home about :-)

Can't you simply create an image well and put something from the timeline into it (such as a group in Motion)? You can get the image input's start time and duration, so you could offer the user a control for an offset from the beginning of the clip, or something like that, if you needed to.

Darrin

On Mar 27, 2009, at 10:31 AM, Andrew Mees wrote:

Hey Darrin
Here's a perfect real world example: A text crawl/roll where the duration is defined not simply by length of text but also by a user supplied fixed (or variable) crawl/roll rate.
In such a case, having the generator run longer or shorter than the content provides no valid purpose. The user would be unable to predict the generator instances duration with any accuracy beforehand and must instead interact with the timeline instances physical duration manually in order to discover and set its effective duration ... all that could have been provided and/or handled programatically.

Hardly earth ground breaking perhaps but hopefully that helps make the concept of allowing code driven generator duration to make a little more sense. Now, as to whether such a capability is more important than the users need to control their media, well with the greatest respect, thats probably a decision better left to the user. One would hope and assume that a conscientious developer would provide their users with an option to enable/disable any programmatic control ...

Now I'm just thinking out loud here, but if I have your ear at the moment then there are certainly other functions I'd dearly LOVE to see added first. How about a call that returns to a generator an image buffer for the timeline at the given track and frame. Hoo boy, now that would be something worth writing home about :-)

Very Best
Andy

On Mar28 , 2009, at 12:05 AM, Darrin Cardani wrote:

You can, but I'd like to see a compelling case as to why. I can understand retiming filters needing this capability because the explicit purpose of the filter is to change the length of the clip. Why is it so important in a generator, though? And more importantly, why is it more important than the user's need to control their media?

Darrin Cardani

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