[Bf-committers] External effects for VSE and or compositor nodes

[Gaspar Fernández]

Hi all!

There are only a few effects in Blender for VSE or compositor. I've been 
thinking about that for years. Even I found, in the past Blender used a 
C api to allow external effect plugins 
(https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Sequencer/Effects/Plugins). 
And don't know why this feature isn't supported now.

Looking for a solution I tried to make my Blender build run image 
filters via Python API but it's very slow (2 frames/sec for a very very 
easy effect, inverting red and blue channels and alpha to 50%), also I 
did not tested using a Python lib so Python will be just calling my C 
lib which does the effect. But I think it may be better making them 
directly in C or C++, I've tested doing the same simple effect in C and 
it's realtime.

I also thought about using a pluggable library for doing this (just 
effects on images or videos), like MLT, where we can add a lot of 
effects and image generators (another very very interesting feature for 
me). It's really difficult to render a strip, apply one effect with 
another program and import the new footage with effect, and sometimes 
animating effect properties or doing little changes is awful repeating 
the whole process again.

What do you think about that?

I've been playing with MLT source, if you think this is interesting I 
think I could make a POC integrating one effect into VSE to see how it 
behaves.

Best regards,
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gaspar Fernández

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