Appendix

How to install Python and PySide to use smartMedia standalone

When using smartMedia inside Nuke then you don’t need to install anything. You can launch it right away. When using smartMedia in standalone mode, however you will need requirements installed on your machine.

This guide will walk you through step by step how to install the requirements. Don’t be intimidated by this lengthy article. Installing both is actually straight forward. We tried to keep the installation steps as detailed as possible so that hopefully everybody can follow along.

When running smartMedia in standalone mode you need these two requirements installed on your machine:

  1. Python: Either Python-2 or Python-3. smartMedia works with both version. Since Python-2 has been deprecated in the beginning of 2020, we recommend using Python-3. We will keep smartMedia backwards compatible with python-2 as long as we can, so don’t be two worried if you want to stay with Python-2 for now, that is totally fine.
  2. PySide. Either PySide1 or PySide2. smartMedia was develloped under PySide2 but is backwards compatible with the older PySide1. We recommend PySide2 since it is newer and supported with Python-3. We will try our best to keep backwards compatibility to PySide1 as long as possible.

The following describes how to install both these requirements.

Installing Python

Before installing Python please first double check if it is not already installed on your machine, because depending on your used operating system, Python is often times pre-installed and you might not even have known it.

To double check if you have Python installed on your machine launch a terminal and enter python. If you see some text and at the end >>> then you already have Python installed and can move forward to installing PySide.

If the above mentioned resulted in an error similar to command not found then read on.

The easiest to download Python is via the official website: http://python.org. smartMedia was developped under Python-3.7.7 which is the very same version that Nuke-13 ships with. We recommend using that version but higher versions might also work. Here you can download 3.7.7: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-377/

  • For Windows we recommend the ‘Windows x86-64 executable installer’
  • For MacOS we recommend the ‘macOS 64-bit installer’
  • For Linux we recommend the ‘Gzipped source tarball’.

Linux users: Depending on your used distribution some more installation steps might be required. Please refer to the web for further information.

Once Python has been installed, launch a terminal and enter python. You should now see some text and at the end >>>. Great, Python is installed.

Installing PySide / PySide2

PySide is a framework that provides graphical user interfaces. smartMedia was written using PySide-2. It is however PySide-1 backwards compatible. So you now need to install one of them.

First let’s check if you already have PySide1 or PySide2 installed. Launch a terminal, type python and press enter. Then type import PySide and press enter. If you get an error message No module named PySide then try import PySide2. If one of these commands actually succeeded you are ready to go. If both things error out then you don’t have PySide installed. Keep reading.

The easiest way to install PySide1 or PySide2 is by installing it via pip. Pip itself is a package manager for Python that lets you install many Python packages fully automatically. Once you have Python installed navigate to https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installation/ and download ‘get-pip.py’. Once downloaded, launch a terminal, enter python, followed by one whitespace and drop your downloaded get-pip.py file into your terminal and press enter. Pip should be installed automatically for you.

Once the installation has finished, launch a new terminal and enter:

pip install PySide

or

pip install PySide2

Note that at this stage, PySide should only bt available for Python-2 and PySide2 should only be available via Python-3. Browsing the web should however give you hints to installing PySide for a different Python version as this is possible if you absolutely require it - we won’t recommend it however.

After PySide or PySide2 have been installed, import PySide or import PySide2 (depending on what you installed) should no longer error out when running Python in your terminal.

When Python (2 or 3) and PySide (1 or 2) have been installed you should be able to click the ‘Start’ file inside your smartMedia root folder to launch it.