Can't reload effect in AE 7.0 on Mac PowerBook

[_Q_Iqbal_]

Hello,

I am unable to reload the plugins that I write, without restarting AE. I did the following two things:

(1) Set the AE_Reserved_Info to 0 (to avoid permanently loaded plugins)
(2) Edit->Purge->All

However, AE does not reload my (newer) plugin. I have to restart AE for the changes to take effect. P

lease help.

Sincerely,

Q. Iqbal

[Bruce Bullis]

Is your plug-in an effect? The re-load trick only works for effects (invoked upon application), not AEGPs (which are invoked at run time)

[_Q_Iqbal_]

yes, it is an effect. Please help. It's really frustrating restarting AE everytime.

Thanks a lot.

Q. Iqbal

[Bruce Bullis]

What's telling you it isn't reloaded?

[_Q_Iqbal_]

Okay, here is how I do it. I load my own plugin (effect). While keeping AE loaded, I recompile another version of the same plugin (with different UI controls, functionality, etc.) and issue the following command in /Applications/Adobe After Effects 7.0/Plugins/
directory:

rm -rf PluginName && ditto -rsrcFork DIRECTORY/PluginName.plugin PluginName.plugin

where, PluginName is the name of the Plugin, and DIRECTORY is where I compile it.

Then, I remove the the plugin in the AE, and do Edit->Purge All, and then reapply the plugin.

However, I do not see the updated plugin; just the older (orginally) loaded version.

If do not anything now, and quit AE, and then restart and reapply my plugin, then I see the new one.

Thanks for all the help.

Sincerely,

Qasim

[Bruce Bullis]

That's odd, but more broadly...

What are you trying to accomplish by making radical changes to the plug-in, during one session of AE?

[_Q_Iqbal_]

I am learning to write AE plugins. I am really grateful to AE team for providing the SDK freely to public so that one can write their own plugins. I envision this SDK shall help me a lot as I would like to do special effects for movies using AE among other things.

The UI additions were just to test the dynamic reloading of the plugin without quitting AE. Typically, I would not do that. The type of plugins I want to program would require a lot of search over the parameter space to empirically determine which one work best for certain conditions and I want to do that experimentation while keeping AE loaded to save development time.

I tried to debug my plugin(s) using the "attach" feature of Xcode, however, I had no success with that either.

May be I am doing something wrong. However, I read the relevant section in the manual many times and I could not figure out what to do.

Also, moving over to the Xcode is great for Mac -- as it is freely available. However, for the Windows one needs to purchase MS Visual Studio. I hope it is technically possible to take the current Windows SDK and use the freely available GCC for windows to produce a plugin dll -- I need to experiment with that soon. May be you guys provide the plugins for Windows based on GCC as well -- as they are through Xcode. In case you need a free IDE, then something like Dev-C++, which provides a great free IDE can help. In addition, if you use Mingw-based GCC instead of Cygwin-based GCC one does not need to have ligcygwin on all the platforms and the plugin dlls can be freely interchanged.

One note on the manual. Though it is a great effort. However, it is perhaps not targeted at starters like me who want to learn AE plugin programming. For reference it is great, though. I have had some difficulty going through it and understanding some key concepts.

Thanks again for all your help and effort.

Sincerely,

Q. Iqbal

[Bruce Bullis]

We won't be porting the Windows SDK anywhere; it's enough work to keep it running in the environments we use internally, without introducing an external dependency on gcc Windows distributions. Good luck, though, if you choose to pursue that on your own!

Regarding attaching:

http://blogs.adobe.com/ae_api/2006/03/more_xcode_debugging_details.html

As far as helping beginning plug-in developers:

http://blogs.adobe.com/ae_api/Head_First_Plug-in_Development.pdf