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The installation and licensing of Open FX plugins is handled by a vendor’s own installer. Once installed, Open FX plugins appear within the Library of the Open FX panel, which can be opened by clicking the FX button at the top right of the Color page or Edit page Interface toolbar.
Where are OFX Installed?
According to the standard governing how OFX work, all OFX plugins on a particular workstation are installed into a standardized location to foster plugin compatibility with multiple applications. These locations are:
— On macOS: /Library/OFX/Plugins
— On Windows: C:/Program Files/Common Files/OFX/Plugins
— On Linux: /usr/OFX/Plugins
Open FX Plugins Can Be Processor Intensive
Because they create such a wide variety of effects, some third-party Open FX plugins can be extremely processor intensive, all the more if you add multiple plugins to a single grade. If you find your playback performance dropping because of a particularly expensive effects operation, you can use the Smart Cache to automatically cache nodes and clips that have Open FX plugins applied to them. Once fully cached, you can play these clips back in real time, at least until you change that clip’s grade again. For more information on caching and on improving performance in DaVinci Resolve overall, see Chapter 8, “Improving Performance, Proxies, and the Render Cache.”
Browsing the Effects Library
All of these built-in plugins appear within categories at the top of the Effects Library.
Click the Effects button to open the Effects Library
When you click the Effects button, the Effects panel opens out of the right side of the Node Editor to show the Library, resizing the Viewer, Gallery, and Node Editor to make room. The Effects Library is organized hierarchically. Each vendor’s plugins appear under a header with the name of that plugin collection, and possibly organized into categories, separated by headers with Open or Close arrows that appear to the right of the category name, which let you show or hide the contents so that you can make the hierarchy as compact or spread out as you like.
— Move the pointer over the header you want to open or close, and click the Close or Open arrow to the right of the category name.
— To open or close all headers at once, Option-click the Open or Close arrow.
Since many Open FX plugin collections are quite large, an optional Search field can be opened at the top of the Library that lets you quickly find plugins by name or partial name.