Can someone please remind me about this, i did scan the documentation headings but didn’t know where to start reading for this info.
I need to be able to record to a codec with alpha channel included — ProRes 4444 ideally. Use case is for rendering out titles and bottom third animations and stuff like that. I can do it in QC and mimoLive today but I’d love to be able compile an app and have video editor with a Mac be able to use the custom effect bottom thirds, titles, stuff like that I generate for events and brands, with text field inputs so they can roll their own adjusting all the timing and other effects inputs to get it just right.
Not having an alpha channel means I need to pre-multiply alpha values per pixel and it’s not as easy to make the rendered video work after that. Either that or render two movies, the “fill” image with no transparency and the “key” image (alpha rendered as greyscale to be used in the client NLE software)
Just last week I built out some animated stings for use in a video, made using Vuo.
I used the Image Generator protocol Edit>Protocols>Image Generator.
This lets you render really high quality anti-aliased, motion blurred alpha channel content. I used H.265 with alpha channel. Motion blur makes stuff look :chef kiss:
Thanks for the responses everybody, just getting back onto this issue in my own work… to clarify, as it seems I didn’t make it clear enough, I want to have a double click application (macOS) in which the users can preview the vision as they adjust inputs (text inputs for on screen text, value sliders for effects, booleans for effects) and then somehow (preferably) with a dropdown menu item “Render to movie…” where they can set up an offline render (or at least a live recording and manually trigger the timeline of effects to start).
Look like some of this an be achieved with the Save image to movie and Save Frames to Movie nodes and I’d just need to set up some timeline control logic and maybe a second window for the record to movie button and settings to choose the recording format, dimensions etc. Dropdown menu item might be a bit too much of an ask… is there a skeleton Vuo project for Xcode that shows how to load Vuo compositions and bind inputs etc? One option would be to pay a Swift/ObjC developer to finish the app building in Xcode, essentially wrapping the Vuo composition(s) and other assets with a simple GUI.
I don’t want to just share the composition with them and ask them to render it themselves for “ease of use” reasons and also it might become the basis of a commercial effects package, so unless the code is hidden away in custom nodes with a time or IP based limitation it’s not smart to share the source files.
If I could compile Vuo composition to the Adobe FX API then I’d just do that, what I’m exploring is essentially a work around to that because very few editors/post-production people use FCP these days. For better or worse that’s just how it is and Adobe is adding lots of new features to PPro and integrating Audition to try and cement their position as the “go to” entry level NLE, I expect DaVinci Resolve will continue to grow faster the FCP too, Apple have a habit of doing something good with software then leaving it to die on the vine.
I’ll check out these examples first thing next week when I return to my own work. Thanks!
Ok I took the Save Processed Movie composition, published the input movie URL and Movie format inputs and made an app. When I run the app nothing happens in terms of generating the movie file.
For some reason the chess.mov file wasn’t copied into the app package (the manual says all resources files identified with a valid relative URL port are copied into the app package) so I added it to the Contents/Resources folder. Still doesn’t work when I double click. Removed published ports (which weren’t visible to me anyhow even via Command+“I” or some menu item.
I’m must be missing something obvious, but me + manual => dead end on this one. With Kineme App builder I seem to recall we needed to change the relative URLs for life in the app… maybe it’s something simple like that?!
So making the URL absolute (/Users/aleith/Downloads/vuo-2.3.2.11610–composition-examples/vuo.video/examples/chess.mov) and then exporting the app works.
So I need to solve
Having published inputs for the exported app (maybe I need to build my own GUI for this, I was expecting a Kineme Quartz Builder style floating palette window of inputs showing published ports labelled and with editable values).
Relative paths that work to locate resource files within the exported application package. The following line in the manual seems to not be accurate in all cases.
Update the manual to explicitly explain the way forward with 1) and 2) for new comers to Vuo. So called “onboarding” in the app itself would help for this, I can make some suggestions if there is enthusiasm for that. Onboarding are nudges in the host application GUI that help new users work out how to use features and avoid common gotchas.
Also the published ports aren’t accessible in the app, so I guess that’s a no go for exported apps, strange given that Quartz Builder had that from day one. Can somebody confirm that a custom GUI (perhaps in a second window) is the only way to do that, please?
@useful_design Have a look at the composition/explanation I posted here if that might help you: https://community.vuo.org/t/-/6621. There is a lot more to custom GUIs, but you can have a preview window and save to a movie without having two separate windows
Thanks @MartinusMagneson for the Keystone comp, it’s a good example of building a custom GUI for an exported app. I was hoping that int, real and text types at least (and preferably enumerated lists selections as dropdown menus) could be inputted just using standard macOS GUI — which I don’t have to build! () — like with Kineme’s QuartzBuilder. I guess not. I seem to go on about QC a lot don’t I? Its probably because I got pretty deep into that set of tools and haven’t got at all far with Vuo yet.
Seem to recall you made a number slider GUI composition or custom node to at some point?
Well. The reason for VUO existing is to be a replacement for QC, so it becomes natural to think of it in terms of what seems more functional vs less functional.
) — like with Kineme’s QuartzBuilder. I guess not. I seem to go on about QC a lot don’t I? Its probably because I got pretty deep into that set of tools and haven’t got at all far with Vuo yet.