Wow, fantastic response from the community!
I’ve been reading all of your comments with delight, both here and on Vimeo and in a couple of forums. I’ll try to answer some questions here!
Mr Rotobastard among others had some good points, number 1 is sort of already in place, I have a system for defining a project structure and bring in all material in the whole project. You just need to supply your root project folder and you can step between projects, I’ll show this in a post soon. Nothing specific for versioning yet though!
Command port sounds good! I’ll have to investigate how that works.
I intend to look into gamma preview sliders and such in the player, and also black bars and flip/flop and other transformations, it’s all realtime in OpenGL anyway. A LUT would of course be the next step there.
Export is definitely on the list, basically a commit to disk-feature for your edits, also multi renaming and moving of files. One of the mantras I’ve had in my head while developing this application is “The end of browsing!” For each feature I add, I make sure to stick to this basic idea, hopefully you’ll never find (or need) a browse dialogue in vfxDesktop, however you may have to manually type in your root project directory/file server the first time you run it!
How does the glue to the apps work? Will, I’ve taken a look at each application to see how to interface with it, and some apps only allow one instance, and can take files as arguments, those are the easy ones! Photoshop for instance. For After Effects it’s similar, but I needed to generate an AE script to import, but it allows importing in an existing instance of the application so it works smoothly. Boujou and Mocha is very simple, they only need a frame passed as an argument. For Shake and Nuke I decided the easiest way is to generate scripts which you simply paste into the respective applications to get Filein nodes.
Some of this stuff is Windows-native code, such as drag-dropping into the app window and using the clipboard-buffer for pasting, but it’s separated in the code for the day I venture into Linux-land. My libraries should be cross platform, all filesystem interaction and threading is written using Boost, and the whole UI is written using OpenGL, so the core stuff should definitely work.
Then there’s been a lot of questions about beta/licensing/open source and such. I definitely want to get it out there for you all to try! I’ll do my best to whip up a version which is suitable for an early alpha-preview. At this point, there are some features which are half-complete, and I suspect that you all will find problems which I could never anticipate! I also have a feeling that this application might change shape slightly to avoid stepping on some obvious toes. I call for your ideas on this, it will help making it public!
Keep posting your suggestions, thanks everyone!
May 8, 2009 at 14:53 |
Lookung forward to have an alpha-version to test in a production pipeline. I´m sure there will be a lot of people that will provide feedback for your app.
And bringing beta versions to production will help the development, so the final version will go straight to Tranformers 3, Watchmen 2 and so on…
May 8, 2009 at 17:16 |
Does the windows native code mean there is currently no plans for OS X support?
Looking forwards to been able to play with it on any platform though!
May 8, 2009 at 17:33 |
Gui: That would be something
Dave: Only some of the code is Windows native, and it only has to do with OS interactions (window handling, external copy-paste etc), that only means that this will have to be solved on a per-OS basis, but main app is built on cross-platform libraries. In theory it should be possible, I just haven’t tried coding anything for OS X yet.
May 8, 2009 at 22:53 |
Is there a way to automatically get updates from your site? I would love to keep following this, and of course try it when it comes out.
Great ideas , and good on yeah for sharing.
very very cool stuff!
-=s
May 9, 2009 at 01:00 |
Good to hear! Hopefully you can have a successful venture into os x. :p
Steve there is a link for rss at the bottom of the page:
http://vfxdesktop.wordpress.com/feed/
May 9, 2009 at 12:53 |
Very nice app.
Nice feature to have is ability to link a sound with EDL and play it in sync.
Keep it going
May 9, 2009 at 18:37 |
Hate to sound like an asshole but I would strongly advise you to opensource it before you get sued by Autodesk. You also might get the ports for free that way.
May 10, 2009 at 01:02 |
Don’t worry mate, I won’t be charging money any time soon! The cosmetic likeness will probably change anyway, I don’t think it’s necessary for the workflow. The rest is part of the free flow of ideas, inspiration comes from many sources, Autodesk have nothing to do with what’s going on under the hood.
May 10, 2009 at 23:05 |
Hi Arvid
Good to hear that your’ thinking ahead with the Autodesk menace
also as an alternative GUI to avoid the reels, maybe a bin system could work well too. You could have several scaled down bins on your desktop and just make one (or several) bigger with a gestural selection+hotkey. you could still drag/drop clips between the bins, have bins inside other bins, use color coding etc… I have been working on flame for 15 years and I think the reels can be greatly improved. It was a great ideas back then but it’s a very old concept now that has lots of limitations. Maybe you could even make a hybrid desktop with a couple of reels and bins on the other half of the screen?
May 10, 2009 at 23:50 |
Very cool! If you made the reels vertical I’d have my old Quantel Henry back! Have you thought of hooking up with Ton of Blender 3D? This is the editor they need in Blender and you’d have a powerful node based 3D compositor.
May 11, 2009 at 13:28 |
First off: This looks really awesome!
I’d love to see two things added: OS X support and hosting for OpenFX plugins (http//openfx.sourceforge.net). That way we could run commercial plugins like Furnace, Tinder, and Sapphire from inside vfxDesktop, and it would be easy for any studio to integrate their own effects or for open source developers to help you with getting a basic compositing toolset ready (Invert, Color Corrector, Logic Ops, Resize/Reformat, Simple Keyer, Roto etc.) that would make it possible to do quick comps without having to go into a specialized application. It would also protect image processing code from having to be changed when you make architectural changes to the core application, which is bound to happen at such an early development stage.
May 15, 2009 at 11:20 |
Hi! Amazing app. Hope it will be finished soon. We miss something like that for our work in Nuke and AE. Good work!