I often need to wrangle web pages for publication and quite often copy/paste is littered with referer info and session junk. Luckily, many websites can generate a clean url by just stripping everything after a ? in the url. This Safari Extension does just that, opens a url in a new tab with everything to the left of the ? symbol retained so you can check if your new url is usable for publication. The extension is installed as a context menu used while hovering over an anchor link.
Moving some things to github: Adobe Illustrator to Core Graphics Paths script
I’m starting to migrate some of my code to github and I’ve started with a script to export an Adobe Illustrator path to Core Graphics code in an Objective-C class. This is mainly useful for iPhone development, but also might be useful for anyone looking to parse EPS style graphics.
A CSV Text Data Plugin for FCPX/Motion 5
This is a small plugin for FCPX/Motion 5 that will allow you to import a CSV file to create text plates for things like slates, lower thirds, and titles.
FCPX continues to be a work in progress and I have the same reaction as most people. Seems powerful, but where’s x, y, and z? In the short term we seem to have lost a lot of data in xml transfers so I was looking for a way to populate slates in my projects without a lot of typing and this seemed to fit the bill.
This is the first public release so don’t use it in sensitive production projects until the plugin is battle tested because the project format for arbitrary data seems somewhat fragile and it seems easier to corrupt FCPX project files then you would ever find ideal. I’ve got a list of features as well as bugs to file and if there is interest this might become a useful production plugin, so please help me by trying it out and reporting any problems you might find. This will only work in the latest version of FCPX 10.4 and above.
Revision History
06-09-12 1.0 Initial Public Release
06-14-12 1.1 30% Speed increase by using GLSL/FBO for Quartz Composer composite, stability fixes
OSX Drawing with Quartz 2d for After Effects Plugins; A Quartz Composer Laces Sample Plugin
When working on custom projects I develop a lot of single use plugins for things like data visualization. Although I’m becoming more comfortable with OpenGL, my comfort zone for drawing is really using the tools available on OSX like Quartz 2d. After Effects is my favorite compositing environment and it took a while to build a working toolkit for OSX drawing in an After Effects plugin with things like build phases, importing frameworks, Objective-C++, CGContextRef, PF_EffectWorld, PF_Handle, etc. To help folks trying to get that toolkit together I thought I’d share a starting point XCode project as well as the base drawing code for one of the data viz tools I’m working on.
The XCode project can be a useful starting point for a developer interested in these kinds of projects. It includes linked frameworks, a reasonable memory allocation scheme (I think, more experienced devs feel free to point out any gotchas), a working example of how to use both CGContextRef and NSGraphicsContext and some useful drawing code.
The sample plugin is a Quartz Composer style laces plugin which can work nicely for connecting nodes or data visualizations. The included version is pretty bare bones, but if there is interest I am thinking about developing it in to a more full featured general purpose plugin.
This setup has worked for my needs and has been cursorily checked for bugs, leaks and crashers, but if you are going to use it for production work I’d make sure to attempt some pre-renders at the size, bit depth, etc. you are using to make sure there is not something I didn’t account for.
If you end up using the code in something you release, I’d appreciate a credit in the release notes. Tip of the hat to Edouard FISCHER for the original laces drawing code. Next up is a deeper dive into OpenGL, Quartz Composer, textures, and all kinds of fast drawing GPU goodness.
Laces Plugin for OSX After Effects
Laces Plugin Xcode Project For OSX
Boethos, an online GUI editor to generate JSX code for After Effects
A new year and a chance for fresh starts. Luckily, Chris Green wrote something worth pointing to with Boethos, a code generator that generates JSX code for Adobe apps in conduction with the jsLinb UI Builder. It’s very nice way to generate a slick UI with a minimum of hassle and cut down on the broiler plate code writing. What more can a dev ask for?
Zipping files by type and date range from OSX command line
I needed to zip some flash files that had changed in the last 3 days across a set of subdirectories. This is the one liner that I came up with. This is mainly for future me as this comes up all the time.
find /in/directory/ -mtime -3 | grep fla | xargs zip foundFiles
find /in/directory/ -mtime -3 finds all of the files changed in the last 3 days. -mtime has a nice set of options.
grep fla finds the flash files. Regular expressions can get really complicated. This one isn’t, so it’s possible that it might match unintended files. Run up to this part to see if it will grab your files of interest so you don’t zip a bunch of unnecessary files.
xargs zip foundFiles xargs is a handy utility that takes arguments from a pipe and hands them to another program – in this case zip.
After you run this you should have a zip in your home directory named foundFiles.zip or whatever you chose to call the files.
Todd Kopriva posts scripting changes in After Effects CS5
Not sure how I missed this when he first posted, but Todd Kopriva has posted a nice rundown on all of the scripting changes made in After Effects CS5. Also glad to hear there will be an update to the Scripting Reference docs that were getting long in the tooth. Todd and Jeff Almasol do a great job with supporting the scripting community around After Effects.
A PixelBender Rounded Rect Generator for After Effects
Why Rounded Rects? Because Steve Jobs says they are everywhere. And because a cursory search didn’t find anything for Pixel Bender. Use this plugin to generate a solid color rounded rect or sample footage to easily add rounded corners to your footage.
Tip of the Hat to David Van Brink for his Pixel Bender efforts and especially for making me think of the generative possibilities of Pixel Bender in addition to image processing. And to Greg Best whose Core Image Kernel is the basis for this.
<languageVersion : 1.0;> kernel RoundedRect < namespace : ""; vendor : "Creative Workflow Hacks: Dale Bradshaw, http://creative-workflow-hacks.com"; version : 1; description : "Generates a Rounded Rect given an Upper Left coordinate, a Bottom Right coordinate, a Corner radius, and a Color or Sampled Footage"; displayname: "Rounded Rect"; > { input image4 image; output pixel4 result; parameter float4 color <defaultValue: float4(1,1,1,1); aeDisplayName: "Rect Color"; aeUIControl: "aeColor";>; parameter bool transfer<defaultValue: false;aeUIControl: "aeCheckbox";aeDisplayName: "Sample Footage";>; parameter float radius<defaultValue:25.0;minValue:0.0;maxValue:100.0;>; parameter float2 upperLeft<aePointRelativeDefaultValue: float2(0.01, 0.01);aeDisplayName: "Upper Left";aeUIControl: "aePoint";>; parameter float2 bottomRight<aePointRelativeDefaultValue: float2(.98,.98);aeDisplayName: "Bottom Right";aeUIControl: "aePoint";>; void evaluatePixel() { float2 p = outCoord(); float dist = 0.0; dist += (p.x < upperLeft.x + radius) ? pow((upperLeft.x + radius) - p.x, 2.0) : 0.0; dist += (p.y < upperLeft.y + radius) ? pow((upperLeft.y + radius) - p.y, 2.0) : 0.0; dist += (p.x > bottomRight.x -radius) ? pow((bottomRight.x -radius) - p.x, 2.0) : 0.0; dist += (p.y > bottomRight.y - radius) ? pow((bottomRight.y -radius) - p.y, 2.0) : 0.0; dist = sqrt(dist); dist = clamp(radius - dist, 0.0, 1.0); if(transfer) result = sampleNearest(image,p) * dist; else result = color * dist; } }
Download db_roundedRect.pbk Pixel Bender kernel
This Kernel is set up as After Effects plugin, but it should be relatively easy to setup for Flash. I’ll update it when I get a chance to check it out.
Building Animated Lower Thirds in Photoshop
An AdobeTV segment on a Photoshop/Premiere Lower Third workflow. There is a lot to like about Premiere Pro. I’m thinking about taking a deeper dive into a pure Adobe edit workflow to see if the Adobe Über-integration is worth the mono nature of that particular ecosystem.
64 bit issues running osascript from terminal
If you use osascript to run applescript from the command line, you may have run into errors looking something like:
Error loading /Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: ... no matching architecture in universal wrapper
This is due to osascript running in 64 bit mode and being unable to load a 32 bit addition. A quick fix is to force osascript to use i386 architecture, like so:
arch -i386 osascript path/to/applescript
In addition, you can now eliminate the error referenced above by downloading the latest 64 bit Adobe Unit Types.osax from the Adobe site.
Here’s hoping the 64 bit transition goes smoothly for all involved. I’m thinking the performance payoffs will make these little workflow snags worth the effort.