Carousel Slideshow FCPX Plugin

A video describing a new FCPX plugin I created. A Carousel Slideshow of Videos/Photos. Free download on the youtube site. Hope you find this useful. Any comments, or suggestions, greatly appreciated.

Demo of Carousel Slideshow

Hi Ken,

I really like the concept and animation, admire your endurance to put such a pile of masks and drop zones together ... but 177MBs? For a plugin*? (google clamours 'too big for a virus scan' …)

Most of your backgrounds are 2k res although the project is set for 1080, and, yeah, high quality png, nice2have....

But, meant as a suggestion:
instead a megaton of bg pix, what about publishing a bg-dropzone?

kinda 'lite' version of your transition... plugin .... *oops: you do share a PROJECT??
it's a .motn, no .motr!
No use for people without owning Motion5 ....


Hate to say, but back to the drawing board ...

Thanks Karsten, for your constructive comments. Your point is well taken, particularly about the background .png files used in each of the plugins. Since there were 4 different plugin types, within the .zip file... and each, gave the user the same choice of backgrounds to use for that specific plugin, that meant that each plugin had the same set of .png background files in their respective media folders. So this set of media files was repeated 4 times, once in the media folder of each plugin. In order to reduce that file bloat, ideally, each of the plugins should somehow use the same media folder so you would only need one set of background media files. I am not sure how that could be done, as it appears to me, that Apple has a straight forward way of setting up the file structure for each plugin and it's associated media files. I will try putting all 4 .motn files together in same sub-folder and see if I can get them all to use same media sub folder. Or perhaps I could have left out the background functionality altogether, as each of the plugins have transparent backgrounds and the user could easily put their own background clip underneath the timeline, thus getting rid of this bloat altogether. About 85% of the entire .zip file is taken up by these 4 sets of background media files.

The second good point you made, was, I used several of the background .png files included in Motion under the content directory of the Library tab, for these backgrounds without regard for their size. Apparently as you said, they are 2K in size. Since my project was set at 1080px, I could have saved considerable space by finding files that matched my project size, thus greatly reducing the overall MB used.

I wasn't quite clear on what you meant when you referred to .motn no .motr, as all the plugins appear to be generators using the .motn extension. Also I am not seeing a reason why an FCPX user would need Motion to use these plugins. Unless they wanted to further expand, re-engineer or change the present functionality. The functionality in each of the plugins, allows the user to set the number of Dropzones within this generator clip, from 3 to 12 within FCPX without having to go back and forth to Motion, from a popup box (Once they select the amount of drop zones they want to use from the dropdown box, they just trim the generator clip in the timeline to match that amount of DZ they chose.) Is there some functionality you are referring to, that would force the user to go back and forth to Motion, in order to use these, that I am not understanding?

Again, please forgive me but being new at this, I may have missed the meaning in some of the good points you are making.

As always, your helpful comments are greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Ken

KBayquoi wrote: …I wasn't quite clear on what you meant when you referred to .motn no .motr, as all the plugins appear to be generators using the .motn extension. …

my fault, stand corrected, wasn't aware its is meant intentionally as 'generators' .... thought it is some sort of transition or effect...

Motion Project files as Generators do share the same suffix ... sorry for confusing you!

The other topic, if for example aliases or symLinks are optional to reduce file-size ask for further investigations ....

Thanks again, Karsten. Symlinks reduced the 177MB zip file down to 74MB. What a difference. I am embarrassed I did not think of that one, before. I can probably get that 74MB down a little further by replacing the 2K background media files with 1080 files, but for now, I am very happy with the difference that the symlinks did.

I also just found your CallOutDotLineDot file which I downloaded and it seems to have given me the answer to a problem I was having with another project I am working on.

Damn, you are good!! (Don't let that...go to your head!)

Regards,
Ken

The new motion 5.3 and FXPX have caused this plugin to stop working. It is only useable on earlier versions for now. I am working on trying to figure out what they changed, that is causing this to break in the new version...so, stay tuned.