Glory
Time marches forward. Computers are faster, hard drives and screens are bigger, cameras are smaller.
My usual settings have grown from 8 bit, 640×480 to 32 bit 720p. (Yeah, I’ve lost my fear of nonsquare pixels.)
Adobe just announced After Effects CS5, and I’m happy to report that the Omino After Effects Suite is fully ported for Mac OS X, 64-bit, and getting ready to roll.
And they’ve started their migration from humble 8-bit processes to glamorous 32-bit floating point processes, as well.
Tragedy
The great tragedy is that CS5 broke backwards compatibility with CS4 plugins. Oh, there were Reasons, oh yes, there always are. And, oh, they’ve made it relatively easy for developers to recompile, which I’ve done. (Worked like a charm.)
But between Apple’s fickleness (68k, powerPC, Intel) and, now, this… there’s a trail of plugin corpses. Great sadness.
Some of my favorite Plugins don’t even exist for AE Intel Mac. Actually, the only ones I’ve paid for… WalkerFx’s stargate, and dvGarage’s dvMatte Pro. How I do wail!
Rays of Hope
But are things, overall, getting better? Oh yes, much better.
My CS5 plugins are Mac only, for now.
The Mac/Win CS4 versions will remain available. Or should I say, will remain on display in the Marketplace that all may witness their demise and death, their only crime having been to be compiled at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Hope for CS5 Win recompiles as well … do you think something like a general 32-to-64Bit-Bridge for old plugins could be done (relatively) easy?
Alas, I bet a 32-to-64 bit plugin bridge would be very hard.
For an upscale software application with a large user base — like After Effects — backwards compatibility is your lifeblood. We have to assume that the AE marketing and development team agonized deeply, very deeply, on the matter before making their necessary design choices, and would have provided such an adapter if it were anything less than very very very hard.
In music software there are such bridges… sometimes I have the feeling Adobe is afraid of supporting such life savers by just forcing everybody to update: http://jstuff.wordpress.com/jbridge/