Communicating with the plug-in state

Communicating with the plug-in state

Communicating with the plug-in state Prepare the necessary information, such as parameter values, for your FxPlug plug-in to render.

Overview

One of the biggest changes between FxPlug 3 and 4 is that now there is no FxPlug API access at render time. Rendering occurs out-of-process, reducing the amount of back and forth between the host app and the plug-in, which is essential for performance. Thus, if you call FxParameterRetrievalAPI_v6 at render time, it will return nil.

This means that your plug-in must prepare what it needs to know to render before render time. Then, at render time, this information is provided to your plug-in. This information is called the Plug-in State. It’s represented by a byte-buffer of NSData of your own creation that can be passed to the rendering method at render time. The content of the NSData object is up to you, but it typically contains parameter values from the host application’s UI, or values calculated from those parameter values.