Have you ever wished in ProPresenter 6, that you could simply rotate one of those pesky videos/images that you sometimes get from mobile phones?.....You know the ones that display sideways or upside down.
Each media effect (Color Invert, Blur, Adjust Color etc) in ProPresenter 6 is actually made up of 3 files which are located in the program folder of ProPresenter 6. This is true for both the MacOS and Windows versions of ProPresenter 6.
These files, which define each effect, are human readable text files. Two of the three files are standard GLSL files (.frag and .vert), and the third is proprietry format that descibes the effect name and adjustable parameters (.rvfx).
I have found (much to my surprise and joy) that you can create your own files for new effects and simply copy them to the folder where ProPresenter keeps all its standard effects files - and ProPresenter will add and use your new effect.
So a single effect in Pro6 is actually made of three files - Which you and I can edit or create!
I don't know GLSL at all, but I was able to read the existing effects files and figure out how to add a few effects that I always wished ProPresenter had: Rotation, Scale and Translation of media. Finally I have a way to rotate those pesky videos and images that I sometime get from mobile phones in all sorts of wonderful orientations.
By the way, the first effect I created was for opacity - I have included that here just "for kicks", as I am not sure if there is any valid use for it - other than being a good "Hello World" experience for me getting started in this exercise.
To use one of these effects copy the three files that make the effect to the folder where ProPresenter 6 stores all it's media effects files and then (re)start ProPresenter 6, right-click any slide with a media cue (or any media in the Video/Image bin) and select "Properties" and go to the effects panel where you will see the new effect included in the list of standard effects.
Tips:
- Most people probably just want the "Simple Rotate" - the other shaders are of questionable value!
- To rotate a phone image/video - you will typically want 90, 180, or 270 degrees - The Simple Rotate effect makes this pretty easy. Just slide the "Qtr Rotations" slider and watch your media snap to one of these rotations.
- If the source image is not the same aspect-ratio of your output, you may have to change it from "Scale to Fit" to "Scale to Fill" and then adjust the scale slider after the rotation to make it fit on the screen.
- The scaling is linear - no fancy smoothing - things can get a bit "jaggy" with lower resolutions (This is more noticeable with still images than moving video)
- The "Rotate, Scale, Transform effect gives you lots of control, but you have to adjust more manually!
- The "Rotate, Scale, Transform effect has separate scale controls for X (width) and Y (height) which be useful if you get a stretched video - you can fix the stretch.
- Order matters - if you think about it, the same rotation, scale and translation applied in different order can have very different end results. The "Rotate, Scale, Transform" effect will FIRST Rotate, and after the image is rotated then it will translate the rotated image and finally scale the result. This is not an ideal order and if I figure it out, I'll update the order to scale -> rotate -> translate as that tends to more aligned with what people tend to naturally expect!
To Download, choose the "Clone or Download" green button and choose "Download Zip" to save the zip file which contains all the shader files. (I might add more one day - or maybe you will!). Extract the zip and decide which effect files you want to copy.
So where do I copy the three files for a new custom effect?
The Standard locations for media effect files for ProPresenter 6:
MacOS: /Applications/ProPresenter 6.app/Contents/Frameworks/ssAPI.framework/Versions/A/Resources
Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Renewed Vision\ProPresenter 6\shaders
How to remove? Using these is as simple as copying in the new files. So removing them and "going clean" is just as simple as removing (deleting) any custom shader files you copied. I have prefixed them all with "Dan*" so they are all listed together when you look at the folder and sort by name.
Disclaimer: These are not supported by the makers of ProPresenter 6. Use at your own risk. Feel free to read the files in a text-editor and check for any obvious problems. If you decide to go back a standard "clean" install - just remove the files that you added.
TODO: I wish I could find a way to auto-scale the image to fit the output size - but I'm not sure it's possible (since Pro6 probably does not send the required info about the current output size or the oringial image size to the shader.