attribute vs message, looppoints in jit.qt.movie
Maybe I’m being stupid but…
‘looppoints’ is an attribute to qt.movie so I should be able to set it simply with something like:
[jit.qt.movie @loop 1 @looppoints 600 1000]
Instead I have to send it as a message as shown in patch below. Am I missing something or is it not supposed to work like this?
(still on Max 5.1.3 if thats got anything to do with it)
Thanks for the report, seems to be an issue with specifying it in the object box. We will take a closer look.
-Ben
Ok, so the deal is that you can’t have looppoints before you load a movie.
They are dependent on the timescale and length of the loaded movie, so there is no way to set them in its absence.
-Ben
Ahh ok, its a small thing really (couple extra loadbangs), but does that mean its a message rather than an attribute?
Not quite, but I understand where you are coming from.
An attribute of an object is a setting or property that tells the object how to do its job. Messages, on the other hand, generally ask the object to take a specific action.
In this case, it doesn’t make any sense to set this particular attribute before certain other things have been specified, as as the looppoints attribute is dependent on them.
Granted, this doesn’t hold true across the board. There are lots of legacy messages that are a lot more like attributes, but this is the general rule. Attributes didn’t really exist until Jitter came around, so the process of attributizing stuff could be considered a little bit of a work in progress.
-Ben
OK Ben, thanks for clearing that up!