minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

Just read a post by Michael Cole­man (prod­uct man­ager for Adobe After Effects) con­firm­ing that Adobe doesn’t intend to make it pos­si­ble to run 32-​​bit plug-​​ins in the upcom­ing AE CS5.
The new soft­ware will be 64-​​bit only and requires all third-​​party plug-​​ins to be upgraded by their respec­tive devel­op­ers to the new architecture.

Note: Michael Cole­man has taken the time to respond to my con­cerns in the com­ments.

That in my opin­ion is a mis­take if I’ve ever seen one.

Don’t get me wrong — I applaud the fact that After Effects is mov­ing to a 64-​​bit archi­tec­ture. It’s with­out doubt the way of the future and the com­peti­tors are already there and have been for a while. Per­son­ally, I’m ready… I’ve been run­ning 64-​​bit oper­at­ing sys­tems exclu­sively for years.
How­ever, Adobe needs to remem­ber what AE’s strengths are: In my opin­ion, and that of many other users, a great part of After Effect’s appeal lies in the vast amount of plug-​​ins on offer — free and com­mer­cial.
If that is changed over night, one of the main rea­sons to choose Adobe’s soft­ware over Nuke or Fusion dis­ap­pears over night as well.

A 64-​​bit com­pos­i­tor with­out the right tools to make use of it isn’t worth much, and let’s face it: Bare After Effects sans third-​​party plug-​​ins doesn’t cut it, 64-​​bit or not.

Now on the Mac side the users may be used to get­ting shafted by plat­form tran­si­tions every other year, but Win­dows users have come to love the lux­ury of being able to run obscure plug-​​ins more than 10 years old in some cases. I know many peo­ple that rely on them for their daily work.

It’s been shown in the past that third-​​party devel­op­ers take their time to upgrade plug-​​ins, if they do at all. The main rea­son being that devel­op­ing upgrades to new archi­tec­tures costs time and money. How­ever, they can’t charge their pay­ing cus­tomers for updates like these with­out gen­er­at­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of ill will. Def­i­nitely not a nice sit­u­a­tion to be put in as a devel­oper and one of the rea­sons I don’t sell my soft­ware to the gen­eral pub­lic.
In the case of for-​​hire/​freeware devel­op­ers like myself, there’s no incen­tive to spend the time devel­op­ing an update at all unless I also switch to the new plat­form, which under the described cir­cum­stances I don’t see myself doing.

I think this is some­thing Adobe def­i­nitely needs to reconsider.

There should be a tran­si­tion period where 32-​​bit plug-​​ins are sup­ported seam­lessly along-​​side the (hope­fully soon to be updated) 64-​​bit ver­sions.
It’s tech­ni­cally fea­si­ble: Just look at pro audio soft­ware (Sonar, Reaper, etc.). Those devel­op­ers clearly under­stand the value plug-​​ins have to their cus­tomers and have made the effort to ensure 32-​​bit plug-​​ins will work seam­lessly in their 64-​​bit environments.

If upgrad­ing to CS5 means los­ing (in)valuable plug-​​ins/​waiting ages for updates that may or may not arrive one day, many users are stripped of a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment and might just go ahead and think “Oh well, might as well go with Nuke then if I’m forced to start from scratch any­way”…
I know I’ll be hard pressed not to take this per­fect oppor­tu­nity to ditch After Effects, and I guar­an­tee you I’ll take my home-​​grown plug-​​ins with me wher­ever I hap­pen to end up.

Adden­dum

Just to make it clear: I’m not com­plain­ing as a com­mer­cial plug-​​in devel­oper; I’m com­plain­ing as a user and cus­tomer of After Effects.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about the extra work it would take to upgrade my own plug-​​ins to 64-​​bit — in fact, it’s prob­a­bly not a big deal in my case and port­ing to Nuke’s OpenFX for­mat would actu­ally be more work.
But I have no vested inter­est in AE devel­op­ment — I don’t make money doing it. I also have no ties to After Effects beyond the finan­cial invest­ment I have made in the soft­ware and third-​​party plug-​​ins. If Adobe’s deci­sion to cut sup­port for 32-​​bit plug-​​ins means I lose that invest­ment, you can be sure I’ll take a good look at the alternatives.

If I choose to switch plat­forms over this deci­sion then so be it. It just means that there will be no 64-​​bit updates to my plug-​​ins for AE… noth­ing is lost for me per­son­ally.
Whether this poses a prob­lem for any­one else out there I don’t know.

It’s been brought to my atten­tion that this site doesn’t work too well in Inter­net Explorer 6 and 7. My offi­cial stance on the mat­ter? I could not care less.

I sim­ply refuse to waste any more time deal­ing with Microsoft’s issues. They broke it, they can fix it. minning.de looks fine in all mod­ern browsers and that’s good enough as far as I’m con­cerned.
So peo­ple tell me to give IE8 a try because it’s appar­ently much improved — no. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of Microsoft’s fail­ure to com­ply with 10-​​year-​​old stan­dards and I’m not inter­ested in whether they have finally caught up with the rest of the pack.

Same thing with Win­dows 7. After the hideous, bloated mess that is Vista, I am not giv­ing a Microsoft OS another chance. They clearly have other pri­or­i­ties than what I am look­ing for in an oper­at­ing sys­tem.
The main thing that both­ered me about Vista was that it looked like they let a bunch of ama­teur Win­dow­Blinds the­mers run wild with the inter­face. How am I sup­posed to per­form accu­rate color cor­rec­tions when I’m blinded by the flashy GUI? I quite inten­tion­ally didn’t set up my work­place to be a translu­cent, turquoise Fisher-​​Price envi­ron­ment and I’d pre­fer my com­puter desk­top to reflect that choice. Just stay out of my way, OS!

In the eter­nal words of Weird Al Yankovic: “Poke out my eyes, man!”

Appar­ently Microsoft has a vastly dif­fer­ent opin­ion there as they some­how inex­plic­a­bly man­aged to make the inter­face look even more gar­ish and tacky in Win­dows 7. Words fail me.

Now I’m def­i­nitely not a huge Apple fan — in fact the only time I turn on my Mac is to com­pile soft­ware. But I must hand it to them: At least their stuff looks pro­fes­sional and not like it’s aim­ing to woo preschoolers.