Building OFX generators

[Mateus Mamede Lage]

Dear TuttleOFX developers,

My name is Mateus. I work in a non-profit organization here in Brazil that aims to help deaf ones. We record and edit a lot of videos in Sign Language and for that we used to work with Final Cut. But in order to shrink our expenses with hardware and software, we want to switch to DaVinci Resolve in Windows machines. Everything in the transition was being smooth, but there is just one problem: we have many Motion generators that we use to place vignettes and other text and graphics on screen. Our idea was to make those generator using OFX. That is how we learned about you. Since we are not huge experts in CMAKE and C++, we are not being able to compile plugins. Our idea was to get one of the generators you are provide in your repository, like the Constant, and try to adapt it for what we need. But every time we run CMAKE in Constant folder, it complains about not finding TuttleMacro. We saw that this is a cmake file inside the TuttleOFX\cmake folder and that there are other cmake files there that must also be read. So we tried to run CMAKE in the TuttleOFX root folder. That is when we got errors for BOOST. But we have downloaded boost 1.53.0 and created and environment variable called BOOT_ROOT. But CMAKE says that variable is not set. :(

Do you know how can we get help to set you TuttleOFX and start doing so real generators coding?

Thank you very much for all the assistance you may give us.

Mateus Lage

[Fabien Castan]

Hi Mateus,

My name is Mateus. I work in a non-profit organization here in Brazil that aims to help deaf ones. We record and edit a lot of videos in Sign Language and for that we used to work with Final Cut. But in order to shrink our expenses with hardware and software, we want to switch to DaVinci Resolve in Windows machines. Everything in the transition was being smooth, but there is just one problem: we have many Motion generators that we use to place vignettes and other text and graphics on screen. Our idea was to make those generator using OFX. That is how we learned about you.

Interesting project!

Since we are not huge experts in CMAKE and C++, we are not being able to compile plugins. Our idea was to get one of the generators you are provide in your repository, like the Constant, and try to adapt it for what we need. But every time we run CMAKE in Constant folder, it complains about not finding TuttleMacro. We saw that this is a cmake file inside the TuttleOFX\cmake folder and that there are other cmake files there that must also be read. So we tried to run CMAKE in the TuttleOFX root folder. That is when we got errors for BOOST. But we have downloaded boost 1.53.0 and created and environment variable called BOOT_ROOT. But CMAKE says that variable is not set. :(

Yes, it's required to run it from the root folder.

It should work to set BOOST_ROOT as follow:

cd /path/to/TuttleOFX

mkdir build_release

cd build_release

cmake -DBOOST_ROOT=/path/to/your/boost/installation/ ..

Are you sure you provided the right folder and that there is no typo when you launched it?

Do you know how can we get help to set you TuttleOFX and start doing so real generators coding? 

Thank you very much for all the assistance you may give us.

Sorry for the late reply. I'm not sure to fully understand the kind of generators you need. If you are interested, we can make a conf-call to discuss about your project, so I can give you feedback if OpenFX  and TuttleOFX will be adapted to your needs.

Best,

Fabien

[Fabien Castan]

I am happy to tell you that I was able to generate the project using CMake and Compile a Constant Generator in C++. And it is working on DaVinci Resolve, which was what I wanted to work with.

Great!

I am using the Constant generator as a starting point. I have been reading the OFX documentation, but I didn't find any way to set a specific duration for my generator. All of them just have 5 seconds in Resolve, but I wanted to used different times...

Do you think that is possible?

Yes, by default it is supposed to use the "project duration", but that's different in each software and I don't know if you can configure it in Resolve.

There is an action called GetTimeDomain that can be used to define the time duration of the node:

http://openfx.readthedocs.io/en/doc/Reference/ofxImageEffectActions.html?highlight=GetTimeDomain

Maybe I should use a different context, not generators... is that correct?

Yes, in the documentation it's written that it is only supported in the "General" context, but that sounds strange to not use it for Generators.

I don't know if the general context is supported in Resolve.

You should try in the Generator and in the General context if one of them works.

Best,