a transition's tale
iMovie has a lot of quirks. a major one is how it
differentiates between an effect (a.k.a. 'filter'), a title (text-based effect),
and a transition. rather than unifying the interface for basically three vary
similar operations, iMovie's API uses three different methods to call the
plug-in. the transition is the least intuitive of them all, and the SDK's
examples are an exercise in bad code
design.
consequently, we were loath to go
through the same process we did when we developed our first (PPC-only)
transition way back when. but we could not afford to put it off any longer, and
started transitioning the first transition based on our reference code for the
effect plug-in (at least we knew that that code worked). we ran into a lot of
snags, but finally we prevailed. as of today we now not only have a reference
transition running universal, but also the first transition published on our web
page (pixel-pull transitions - thank you for asking). we now can port
transitions and effects to Intel, and intend to bring our most important ones
over as fast as possible. the new versions sport most of the same improvements
as out effects, plus they now come in a single bundle (instead of three
different plug-ins).
Posted: Fri - May 25, 2007 at 05:32 PM