Invisible Auto-Start UXP Plugins for Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro
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1

With the current state of UXP in Premiere Pro, it appears that invisible auto-start plugins are possible in Premiere Pro Beta 25.4 by adding the following entry to the manifest host object:

  host: [
    {
      app: "premierepro",
      minVersion: "22.3",
      data: {
        apiVersion: 2,
        loadEvent: "startup",
        enableMenuRecording: true,
      },
    },
  ],

And the menu item can be disabled by leaving the manifest entrypoints object blank

entrypoints: []

However there are 2 things which could be improved to be closer to CEP Invisible Panel functionality:

1. Ability to Hide Invisible Panels from the menu

Making an invisible panel and leaving the entrypoints array in the manifest results in a blank parent menu entry:

image
image586×152 9.85 KB

We should be able to completely hide invisible panels from the plugin menu the same way we could with CEP extensions to avoid user confusion.

2. Either allow or ignore UI elements, don’t let invisible UI block the Premiere Pro UI

While devs should not generally be displaying UI elements from their headless panel in practice, currently if any UI element like an alert() is thrown from an invisible panel it is not rendered, however still blocks the Premiere Pro UI until the user presses Escape. This should not be the case (example CCX below)

Working Headless UXP Plugin CCX (writes a file to the desktop):
bolt.uxp.ppro.headless_premierepro.ccx (42.0 KB)

Broken Headless Plugin CCX (runs an alert which is not shown, but blocks the PPRO UI until you hit Escape):
bolt.uxp.ppro.headless_premierepro.ccx (42.0 KB)

Source Code: Example Bolt UXP project:
ppro-uxp-headless-example.zip (105.3 KB)

2

@arsridhar - there’s a big discussion on the Adobe Developers Slack about this, DM me if you need an invite.

3

Thanks for the thorough examination of this, Justin! I’ve added it to our list of feature requests. (internal tracking DVAPR-4257995)
-Dan