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External scripting possibilities

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Jeremie Bordas

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External scripting possibilities

PostWed Aug 05, 2015 9:43 am

Hello,

I am new to Fusion and I would like to use it to automate postprocessing traitment from external programs which I can't do without the Studio version apparently. So before buying it, I had an important question.

I noticed that the support for external scripting seems to be a quite recent feature in Fusion, so I was wondering if every functionality of Fusion was accessible through external scripting yet, especially the Node-Based flow view ?


Thank you.
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michael vorberg

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Re: External scripting possibilities

PostThu Aug 06, 2015 7:54 pm

can you say what are you trying to do?

with external scripting you can do everything you can do with normal scripts in fusion but from the outside. you can open, manipulate, save, close comps. you can add, remove and change nodes. you can load files, connect nodes, move nodes, render, ...
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Chad Capeland

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Re: External scripting possibilities

PostThu Aug 06, 2015 9:42 pm

Jeremie Bordas wrote:I noticed that the support for external scripting seems to be a quite recent feature in Fusion


It's about 12 years old, I think. Been using it for about that long, I'd say. There's different ways of using it, you can make the script ahead of time and execute it, or you can open up Fusion interactively and control it like you were sitting in front of it, even without the GUI.
Chad Capeland
Indicated, LLC
www.floweffects.com
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Jeremie Bordas

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Re: External scripting possibilities

PostFri Aug 07, 2015 9:29 am

Chad Capeland wrote:It's about 12 years old, I think


Oh ok, I got confused by this update report dated on the 19 Mar 2015 which said "This software update provides added support for external Python scripting".

michael vorberg wrote:can you say what are you trying to do?


I would like to be able to "automate" some basic 3D camera tracking from an external program. I've been looking around which software I should use and fusion seemed to be a good solution, but I can't find a solution to automate the finding of tracking points. Is it possible in Fusion or do I have to use Syntheyes or PFTrack ?
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michael vorberg

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Re: External scripting possibilities

PostFri Aug 07, 2015 6:45 pm

There is nothing like a 3d camera tracker in fusion, so you have to look at other software for that

You can still do 2d tracks but then there is no automatic feature detection
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Stefan Ihringer

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Re: External scripting possibilities

PostSat Aug 08, 2015 9:28 pm

Saying that you can control Fusion as if you were sitting in front of it is a bit of a stretch. There are many areas that you can't script properly.

From the top of my head, you can't import a track into a Camera3D tool using scripting. I once had to write my own .ma file parser to generate comps. And I think importing 3D scenes also only works from the GUI (except importing an abc or fbx as a whole). For another script I once missed the possibility to generate step in/step out interpolation between key frames.

I don't know how well you can script the 2D tracker but I think you'll hit road blocks sooner or later as well. A good workaround is usually to create a tool's LUA data in memory and then just paste it into Fusion (for which there is a scripting command).

Syntheyes Pro has "Phases" which is a bit like a node-based tracking approach that can also be scripted. It might help you if you want to do feature detection. It can also automatically export your tracks to all kinds of formats.
blog and Fusion stuff: http://comp-fu.com/2012/06/fusion-script-macro-collection/
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Chad Capeland

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Re: External scripting possibilities

PostSun Aug 09, 2015 4:30 pm

Stefan Ihringer wrote:Saying that you can control Fusion as if you were sitting in front of it is a bit of a stretch. There are many areas that you can't script properly.



That is true. Should be part of the development testing. Every feature/change should be tested via a script. I know Autodesk does that with 3ds max, they have a series of scripts that they run on every build that basically does everything the software can do, and they know the output expected. If it doesn't match, they figure out what failed. The indirect upside of such testing is that the scripting is also tested.

We've had a lot of cases where we've pointed out something that couldn't be edited with scripting and it was either fixed in a subsequent release, or we were pointed to indirect ways of changing it.

That comes down to a documentation problem, too. If users can't find what they can do with a script, there's an issue.
Chad Capeland
Indicated, LLC
www.floweffects.com

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