Can't find plugins

Danny_J's picture

So before i switched to snow leopard all of my plugins were working correctly. Now after i updated everything and put on the new Quartz Composer. None of my plugins appear in the library. When i open some of my compositions a huge debug list pops up. Telling me that certain things won't work due to missing plugins. When i run the viewer to see my work, it totally crashes QC and i have to reopen it. Where am i suppose to put my plugins now?

cwright's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

some plugins just won't work anymore (because they're not compatible with Snow Leopard). Some won't work in 64bit mode (because they're compiled only for 32bit mode, for example).

The location is the same.

offonoll's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

Hi! As many of us, we are attached to same problems, some of you have switched much earlier may know more bugs around external plugins. I would suggest some 'order' on what's has been updated and what needs to be done. maybe in bug reports??

this is my bug report list:

OpenCV.plugin (no plugin detected)

v002ScreenCapture.plugin (no plugin detected)

v002 MoviePlayer.plugin (no plugin detected)

optical flow (Diferent reaction with optical flow plugin)

Particle Tools (crashing when playing)

This is what I found so far.

Danny_J's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

Is there a way to switch QC to be in 32 bit mode? More importantly will the paid Kineme plugins work? If they don't, do we get the new ones for free?

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

Go to where the QC app is in the Developer folder, do a "get info", and then "check-mark" the option for 32-bit.

cwright's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

Most paid kineme plugins will work (Kineme3D's 1.2 beta works in Snow Leopard, Art Net works in Snow Leopard). The only exception is PerformanceInspector -- there are technical difficulties that prevent it from working in Snow Leopard. There's currently no ETA on a fix for that (as it's a wildly unpopular plugin that no one ever talks about or uses).

offonoll's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

Greate George! I didn't know that tip! Now I can load vade's plugins. thank you man!!!

Also thank you vade for your greate and usefull plugs

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

offonoll's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

XD hehehehe... you are greate!!!

still laughting.....

dust's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

to funny GT

franz's picture
performance inspector

Sorry but i was HEAVILY using perf. inspector under Leopard. Not being able to use it under SL is a real pain, and i would be extremely gratefull to Kineme is you were to upgrade it to SL.... all the more as it was a commercial plugin.

No jokes, timing macros is a huge bonus when optimizing comps for realtime use....

smokris's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

offonoll wrote:
OpenCV.plugin (no plugin detected)

Particle Tools (crashing when playing)

When running QC4 in 32bit mode, OpenCV works just as well as it does in Leopard. I'll look into getting a more up-to-date build of OpenCV going, including 64bit compatibility.

The ParticleTools plugin also works in QC4 32bit mode, for the most part. There is some blend-mode strangeness with "Render: Standard", but otherwise I believe it behaves similarly to Leopard. Due to some issues with the underlying framework, ParticleTools isn't going to be a straightforward 64bit transition. It's frozen for now, pending a more significant redesign + rewrite.

smokris's picture
Re: performance inspector

franz wrote:
i would be extremely gratefull to Kineme is you were to upgrade it to SL.... all the more as it was a commercial plugin.

Thanks for your feedback, franz. We'll see what we can do.

cwright's picture
Re: performance inspector

Franz, thanks for letting us know -- I'll have to take a closer look at getting it up and running :)

Not to be contrary, but we cannot maintain something just because it's a commercial plugin -- it takes a significant amount of effort to create/maintain plugins, and we can't guarantee that we can expend that effort indefinitely.

That said, PI should be upgradable without too much effort (and part of it's already done, it just gets sidelined because of its unpopularity in the face of other plugins/products).

cwright's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

regarding openCV -- there's a ton of legacy GWorld (Carbon + ancient QT) junk in there that the camera capture stuff uses to get images from the iSight into the CV image format. This is very very fast (faster than all the alternative image -> CVImage methods researched, IIRC), but also very very 32bit specific. Simply ticking the 64bit checkbox will generate hundreds of errors, and removing the offending code requires removing the Camera Capture patch, breaking backwards compatibility. Writing a replacement for this for 64bit mode is definitely non-trivial (and keeping it high-performance is even more difficult, since QT stuff inherently needs a 32bit background process + IPC/IOSurface... bleh).

smokris's picture
Re: OpenCV 64bit

Is anyone actually using the Camera Capture patch? In the current CVTools beta the documentation says it's disabled (and from my testing this indeed seems to be the case).

I was thinking we would nix the Camera Capture patch (and the underlying CV code) for the 64bit version, and require use of the QCImage->CVImage converter (which is lame, but still performs well enough to be useful, and could be a decent holdover until this is all reimplemented in OpenCL :^] ).

franz's picture
Re: performance inspector

i didn't want to seem greedy, or even complaining. Usually software vendors do paid upgrades when transitioning from one OS to the other. I'm not saying it is a general good practice (esp. when looking at Adobe), but i do understand there are development costs.

Let me re-formulate: ' since PI is a commercial product, users would naturally think it is more likely to be updated than a non-commercial product'

Just curious:

  • don't you use PI internally for your own needs ?
  • is the userbase so reduced ?

Throwing some ideas:

  • total patch count and macro patch count would be nice.
  • using a more readable time unit (maybe just simple reformatting option ?)

cwright's picture
Re: OpenCV 64bit

Ahh, good point (I forgot about that -- I don't have it installed, currently, for whatever reason). Should be able to just gut all that junk then, and see if it still compiles :) (and, it should remove the Carbon/QT framework dependency - double-yay)

cwright's picture
Re: performance inspector

I use it personally all the time :) But I still work on leopard most of the time, so it hasn't been an issue (and we haven't had commissioned composition work for a while, so performance hasn't been super critical)

The userbase is ... checks the license stats ... 28 users. in the whole, wide world.

Total patch count would be pretty easy, and certainly useful.

Can you elaborate on the time unit stuff a bit? (formatting's certainly an option). Would time in ms be more useful?

I fully understand where you're coming from when you suggest that it woul be updated because it's commercial -- I don't disagree. I simply wanted to express that that cannot always be the case. Kineme3D, for example, has taken a severe sales hit with Snow Leopard - as such, it's more difficult to justify spending development time on it. PI's userbase is microscopically small, and, as such, it's also difficult to justify spending copious amounts of time fixing bugs. Not out of abandonment, but simply in the interest of "there are more interesting things to work on, or there are other things to work on that benefit more users".

franz's picture
Re: performance inspector

28 users ? ...... pfff, ok i got it now.....

As far as i can tell (now i'm on SL, so i can't check), the units were exposed in seconds, which is not so handy, as it results in patch timings such as 0.00000280s or something like that ( i may have added one or two zeros). Having an option to re-format to milisecs would be definetly usefull.

Active / Inactive patch count would also be usefull.

vade's picture
Re: Can't find plugins

I just recently cracked the IOSurface 'nut', and have a mostly working version of the screen capture plugin running in 64 bit, as well as running in the editor properly.

It will be some time before you see an updated movieplayer for 64 bit (or until I crack the protocol buffer IPC bullshit, ugh). The good news is IOSurface is fucking fast.

Anyway, v002 Screen Capture as it exists wont run in the QC editor anyway due to OpenGL pixel format issues and context sharing nuances I wont get into. The movie player will run great in 32 bit.