Apple DRM
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 25.01.08In a rather dire turn of events, Apple has just broken every macintosh After Effects installation in the world with the most recent Quicktime update. Quicktime 7.4 does, indeed, introduce the latest in digital rights management for media files. In the meantime, it also prevents After Effects from rendering to said files; you’ll be able to render a project for precisely 10 minutes, at which point Quicktime will crash the render process by “securing” the file-in-progress and locking down user access rights.
The current workaround is to render projects out to an image sequence (PNG files work well), and use Quicktime Pro to save the rendered frames into an MOV (or similar) media file. You may be able to render your image sequence from After Effects into a QT file as well, but be forewarned; even when pre-rendered, if you hit that 10 minute mark, you’re toast.
Ironically, this seems to be affecting OS X installations of After Effects, not Windows. Other applications (such as Lightwave) in OS X are also unaffected. While I appreciate Apple’s attempts to appease both media conglomerates and media consumers, I find it rather horrid that this is can be the result… especially as Apple has been quickly and quietly deleting forum threads regarding the problem. Will we be asked to move to Siberia soon? It’s more than a little disconcerting. At least last time I checked, the 99% negative reviews for the macbook power adapters were still displayed in the apple store.
On the flip side, some people have rightly pointed out that those installing Quicktime 7.4 have done so at their own risk. It’s not a required upgrade, they typed in their password, and clearly didn’t check to see if others were having trouble. You wouldn’t try a blind upgrade to other programs central to your workflow, would you? Adobe is notorious for not supporting Apple updates. It’s taken 6 months for CS3 applications to work in Leopard, and that’s after the year they had previous to the public release, with full Apple developer support.
Shame on Apple for so flippantly breaking a major graphics application in the process of implementing DRM procedures, shame on users for blindly upgrading without checking compatibility, and shame on Adobe for not writing compliant code (CS3 is by far the worst version yet of the Adobe product line – it doesn’t surprise me in the least as we’re seeing more and more fatalities).
mediaboxAdvanced
One point to add about Quicktime 7.4 is that the newest iTunes upgrade (can’t remember which version) seems to require Quicktime 7.4. I tried to open iTunes after upgrading and it repeatedly crashed. After installing Quicktime 7.4, I had no problems whatsoever.
This seems to be another danger of Mac OS X software, that applications are interconnected. Users of both iTunes and After Effects are forced to choose which application will work better, missing out on newer upgrades or paying the price for upgrading.