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OpenFX : An Open Plug-in API for 2D Visual Effects
OpenFX What Is It
OpenFX is an open standard for visual effects plug-ins. It allows plug-ins written to the standard to work on any application that supports the standard. This avoids the current per application fragmentation of plug-in development and support, which causes much heartache to everyone, plug-in developers, application developers and end users alikeOpenFX Aims
The core aims of OpenFX were established early on, these are...- to develop a standard for writing visual effects plug-ins,
- to develop that standard with a broad consensus within the industry,
- have that standard be vendor and operating system neutral,
- have that standard be sufficiently flexible that it supports a wide range of visual effects systems, from editors to compositors.
- have the standard be expandable to other areas in the future, for example sound plug-ins or image i/o plug-ins,
- have any expansion of the standard be done in such a manner so that hosts can easily support plug-ins using differerent versions of the API,
- have plug-ins written to the standard be tunable to the host system they are running on,
- allow hosts to provide extra custom functionality to plugins that wish to use it.
The API
The first version of the API, 1.0 has been released and the header files and examples can be downloaded from the project's main page.The 1.0 version lacks many desired features, this was done so that an initial simple standard could be set as quickly as possible which satisfied most needs. For example, methods for dealing with hardware rendering support have been left until later.
A C++ support library has been written for the API, which simplifies the process of writing plug-ins and makes it much clearer how the API should be used by hosts and plug-ins alike. This can be downloaded from the project's main page as well.
OpenFX History
OpenFX grew out of a conversation at IBC 2002 between Bruno Nicoletti of The Foundry and Tom Benoist of Interactive Effects. Tom asked Bruno to consider making his company's plug-ins work with Tom's visual effects applications. Bruno's response was a regretful, "We'd love too, but we have many other applications we need to port, each of them different, you'll have to wait in line." Tom understood this and said that what the industry needed was an open standard for plug-ins to get around these sorts of problems. With this the idea of OpenFX was born.Early in 2003 The Foundry contacted various visual effects developers, both of plug-ins and applications, and started a mailing list dedicated to OpenFX. Over the next year or so the mailing list grew to more than 90 people from over 20 organisations and was the main forum of discussion for OpenFX. Ideas were mooted, changed, shot down and mooted again. The main developer of OpenFX was Bruno Nicoletti, who took the ideas posted on the mailing list and refined them into documented working code. He did this in the time he could spare from his day to day work at The Foundry.
Occasional face to face meetings were also held, for example around a dozen developers got together in an Amsterdam pub during IBC 2003, where various views were exchanged and beer was drunk.
During 2003, a simple example application and several plug-ins were written by Kevin ('Al') Crate that supported an early version of OpenFX. Hedgehog, as it is known, currently languishes and needs to be updated to support the release version of OpenFX.
Eventually, out of this process, OpenFX took final shape in early 2004. Many application and host developers are now writing to the OpenFX standard, with the intent of releasing that software in 2004.
In May 2004, OpenFX was moved to Source Forge from The Foundry's website, allowing for a more collaborative development environment.
Many companies have developed or are now developing plugins and hosts using the API and real work is being done with them. OFX is a reality in the visual effects industry.