Locked Motion templates

I was skimming through this site yesterday and found a post on locked motion templates, (I can't find the thread today). I had quick look on my own machine and found a few that are indeed locked.

This is worrying for me, I live in the world of corporate and have spent thousands over the years on templates and effects, the ability to open them in motion and make a few tweaks is vital and its a deal-breaker. The ability to edit, remove some graphic element, add a logo with an effect etc to suit the theme of the video in a template is essential.
If templates are locked then it is a  "no buy" from me. Also if we are going down the route then vendors will need to clearly state if the template or effect is locked.  

I can see where you are coming from, but why should a plugin developer put a lot of time and effort into making a product only to have it copied and sold by another?
When I write plugins, some of which are locked, I try to publish all the parameters that are needed for most uses. 

And that is the problem, no one wants their work copied, it's unfortunate but for me, this will influence my buying decisions.

There are also templates not created in Motion but use FxPlug and XCode or Vue.  Those coded templates can’t be opened in Motion. 

Also, some vendors sell “projects” or complex templates you can potentially, but not practically, customize the heck out of, because they are still super limited do to being overly complex to decipher. I’ve given up on much of those.

I do television broadcast for a small independent station on a small budget. So being able to customize a single template for more than one use is vital. I’ve begun getting much more affordable, basic templates I can build on with collections of elements. Like from SVM and a very few others. Complex templates I find have super limited use.  

I understand a dev wanting to protect his stuff, but if it won’t allow me enough customization for more than a one time use, I can’t justify the money. And I find most “locked” templates do not offer nearly enough customization options. 

VUE creates binary files that are not Motion readable. It is not a permissions problem. They use the fxplug interface to go between FCPX and their modules, which are all unique binary modules themselves, strung together with the user defined event paths, and parameters compiled into a binary module that can be identified as an fxplug object.

Editor - I have removed the section of this post that showed how to get around a locked file

Please do not repost


. Please use this only for customization issues (or educational purposes) as it may harm the developer in the longrun if used for other purposes. This is also something to add to your own templates if you want to lock and sell them. DO NOT RESELL someone else's work!