Effect::video() says which kind an effect is. The Add effect menu lists the
two kinds in sections of their own, each scrolling on its own, and offers
video effects only in a video project; a video stage carries a film icon in
the chain and, in a still, is dimmed and skipped like a stage switched off.
enabledStages takes whether the render is a video and is the one place that
leaves video stages out of a still. --help groups the video effects under a
heading of their own, --list-effects marks them, and a video effect given
for a still is skipped with a warning.
VideoEffect is the base every video effect builds on, and keeps the rules a
moving stage has to follow: it takes one value from the shared rng, the same
on every frame, and hands the effect steady and per-frame generators and
loop-rounded time through a Moment, so a subclass writes only animate().
VHS tracking is the first, and the one to copy: the colour planes sway and
shake and a tracking bar rolls down the picture.
That motion moves out of channel split, which is an image effect again and
renders stills exactly as before; forVideo() goes with it. Version 0.7.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A project can now be a clip: Setup has a Video switch with a length, a
frame rate and presets that set the canvas too (Instagram story, reel and
feed video, TikTok / YouTube Short, Square loop, Full HD clip). The preview
renders the whole clip, shrunk to a memory budget, and loops it with
play/pause and a scale; Save As... renders it again at full size and pipes
the frames into ffmpeg as .mp4, .mov, .mkv, .webm or .gif, with a progress
window that can cancel. --duration, --fps and --video-preset do the same
from the command line.
Effects learn about time through FrameTime and Effect::renderFrame, which
falls back to render, so nothing that holds still changes. Channel split
now sways, shakes and rolls a tracking bar down the picture in a video; its
motion params are marked forVideo() and hidden in a still project, and a
still renders byte for byte as before. renderFrames starts every frame
from the same seed and renders the still stages ahead of the first moving
one only once. The version moves to 0.6.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Effect::label(values) names a stage in a list, defaulting to the title;
the text effect answers "Text (words)", and the chain rows are renamed
in place as params change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A picture with a title, a caption and a credit meant typing the same
font, size and colour into every text stage, and changing the look meant
typing them all again. A project now holds named styles: a stage follows
one, and editing it moves every stage that follows it at once.
The front-ends learn nothing effect-specific. A ParamSpec can be marked
.styled(), saying a style carries it rather than the stage, and
Effect::styleKind() names the pool it comes from -- so styleSpecs(kind)
is to a style what params() is to a stage, and a second text-ish effect
would slot into the styles that already exist. The look is what a style
carries; the words and the placement stay on the stage, which is what
lets two stages share a typography in two different corners.
stageValues() resolves one in a single place, and a stage keeps a full
set of values of its own beside the style, so switching it to Custom,
dropping the style, or opening the project in a build that does not know
it renders exactly the same picture. A style moves stages together; it
never holds the only copy of anything.
The command line builds no styles and passes none, so it renders what it
always did.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Whether an effect works from the loaded photographs is now part of the
declarative plug-in contract, next to params(): Effect::needsSources()
defaults to true, and blur — which only softens what it is handed — says
no and blurs an empty canvas when given nothing.
Only the first stage of a cascade ever sees the sources, so
chainNeedsSources() just asks the first stage. Both front-ends gate on
that instead of on "are there any images": the CLI only refuses an empty
batch when the chain wants one, and the interface renders a blur-led
chain with no images loaded, saying whichever thing is actually missing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Port of the Python prototype to C++20 with a CMake build:
- effector_core: GUI-free static library (effects, image IO via gdk-pixbuf,
declarative param specs, registry, portable seeded RNG, thread helper)
- scanlines effect: plans strips from the seeded RNG, then copies pixels in
parallel with memcpy and doubling horizontal tiling
- gtkmm 4 interface: native file dialogs, widgets generated from the param
specs, coalesced background renders, preview as a GDK memory texture
- CLI: flags generated from the effect registry, headless rendering with no
display required
- ctest suite covering the RNG, registry, effect geometry and image round trip
The Python prototype is kept under python-reference/.
