Best route for publishing my Premiere Pro CEP Panel

[Rho_]

Hello Community! Here's my first post 😄

I have recently developed a CEP Panel plugin for Premiere Pro.
(with the help of the github examples and this community I got it to work, thanks!)

Now comes the publishing part of this panel, and my question about this aspect.

context:
The CEP Panel is an 'companion' to a large collection of GPU accelerated Transition- and Effectplugins, and the CEP Panel has no real value outside of those plugins. Those Transitions and Effects have an existing separate Windows and Mac installer (which I also developed)
This part is essentially a Windows platform question, but the thought behind it applies to both...

The Panel will not be published separate form our plugins, so ideally it should be installed from the installer.
I know of various ways of 'getting the files in the correct CEP folder', but all avenues currently inspected leave somehting to be desired;

• Copying the panel myself will not create an entry in the (local) UPI database, whereas the UnifiedPluginInstaller does do this, though I do not know what the effects/ramification of this is.
• Multiple other installers all get the job done, but behave just a little bit differently. Plus, the cannot easily (or legally?) be included in our current installer.
• There is a subtle difference between the (deprecated)ExManCMD and the current Adobe supplied UnifiedPluginInstaller; ExManCMD creates a folder named after the ExtensionBundleID (preferred!), whereas the UPI creates a folder named after the optional(!) 'readable name' ExtensionBundleName (not preferred)
• I've read (somewhere on this community) that for some users/configurations the UPI is not always available. I am not sure how this works but it is probably something like not having Creative Cloud installed (?).

With this in mind, should I...

• Extend our Installer to install the CEP Panel using the UPI. and when not finding the UPI available, use a simple script to copy the (contents of) the ZXP myself?
• Extend our Installer to install the CEP Panel using the UPI. Have a fallback using ExManCmd? And only after all else fails, copy myself?
• what other options are there?

It would be great if endusers are not bothered by doing stuff manually, so if no UPI is found, just handing the zxp of to the enduser ("hey, use one of the existing installers from the internetz") seems like a bad choice.


A little subquestion: can I get the UPI to create the CEP folder based on the ExtensionBundleID, just like ExManCMD? (I dislike spaces in foldernames)



Whoa. My first question on the community. ;'-)

~Rho

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hello @Rho_ ,

For questions about developing CEP panels, please tag the post with the SDK label. That will help the engineering staff answer your question more readily. I have done that for you. I hope the advice helps get your question answered more expeditiously. Good luck on the panel.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Rho_]

Righty-o, will do 😄

[ErinF · Accepted solution]

Hi Rho,

I'm going to let @Bruce Bullis answer some of this but want to weigh in with a couple of hints:

• I've read (somewhere on this community) that for some users/configurations the UPI is not always available. I am not sure how this works but it is probably something like not having Creative Cloud installed (?).

UPI - actually called UPIA - should work in installation environments even when Creative Cloud desktop app is not present.

You need to use an "MXI" file to install other files along with your CEP panel into certain directories on the end user machine. It's very hard to get them to work correctly. They predate ZXP as a format. I've even heard it's even possible to create and distribute a pure MXI package, that just installs a collection of scripts into the correct directory on the user's machine.

Quoting anther developer, he tried a two-fold ZXP method below:

In my experience, I had to do this in two steps, first package CEP panel (CEP_files) to ZXP and then package it into another ZXP with id.mxi. Something like this:

myZXP.zxp
└─CEP
    └- panel.zxp
├- id.mxi
└─ ...

[Rho_]

UPIA, got it. I actually kinda guessed the shortname after I found that little upi sqllite db and foldername.

Oh, the other plugins are large collection of already long eisting c++/native gpu accelerated plugins, not any script at all. And those are actually the main (paid) product. This panel will just be a companion app/panel. (visual preview, presets, keyword-searchable, favorites, ...) It does not have scripts that 'anyone can just use'. People that do not have the main native plugins will have no use for the panel, since it will not do anything for them (apart from showcasing our native gpu-accelerated plugins product).
As such, the route will be to add the Panel to the already existing installer, not add the plugins to the zxp Panel installer, nor publish the Panel as a separate plugin/panel for people to install themselves with either a well-known zxp-installer or the Creative Cloud.

My thought are just on how to deploy the Panel from that installer.

From testing perspective, my Panel can easily be a zxp and then be installed using a simple script: calling the existing UPIA. Currently I'm trying to figure out what actually happens when I install it by using the UPIA: it seems that the Creative Cloud app then list it under "Plugins", as in "Manage Plugins"... which is not how we plan to deploy said zxp (because of it's use-case).

I've seen mr Bullis answering zxp installer questions before, and warning against other routes than using an installer, yet the installer does things we do not want. Quite a conundrum.

[Bruce Bullis]

Great info, thanks Erin!