AE7/Mac Pro – Incessant Crashes!

[Larry Springer]

hey Brian

just got my Mac pro (ATI X1900 video card) this morning, and now running AE 7, I had luck with turning off openGL in AE.
cheers
Larry

“Always take your wallet on stage with you.” ….George Burns

[Joel Jackson]

I’ve been through the ringer with this one. What it comes down to is that AE7.0 is not approved for Intel Macs. It’s terrible but there is nothing you can really do about until Adobe releases the Unversal Binary version of AE (which I’m assured they are working on)

Here are a few tips that may help:

1. don’t try and open AE 6.5 projects in 7 (on Intel Macs) It will crash every time.
2. Ditch your open GL plugin and make sure open GL is off.
3. Projects that are started on the macbook pro have a better chance of working. Stuff originated on a power PC will probably crash or crash during render.
4. Render TGA sequences so when it does crash you don’t loose what you have already rendered.
5. Hiding AE completely during renders seems to help make it through renders.
6. Set AE to autosave every 5 min. or so.
7. Hit caps lock before you render so AE is not trying to preview frames on the screen while rendering.
8. And finally, pray to whichever God you subscribe to that it will work!

This being said, it’s still gonna crash a lot. These are some things I’ve been doing to minimize the problem but they don’t solve the problem 100% (more like 50%).

[Danny Princz]

if you reall want to improve stability use ae7 via bootcamp in xp

[Per Ottesen]

I’ve just installed it for one of my customers, and at first he had an ATI Radeon graphic card with 512 MB RAM, and it all work.

Since then he has used another (smaller) graphic card (NVIDIA GeForce with 256 MB RAM), and then all menus in AE is greyed out.

Strange. Has anyone seen this before, and any ideas to a solution ?

[Tim Wilson]

Adobe has chosen the very wise course of not making any changes to its development schedule to accomodate an artificial deadline that Apple sprung on the world with little or no advance notice to developers.

There’s so little major software left on the Mac platform not developed by Apple that it’s difficult to get any comparison for what a gruesome task this is. It’s easy enough for hardware developers to quickly make drivers, and certainly any of the development teams inside Apple had plenty of time to prepare.

But for the few developers of major software left on Mac? As a former cross-platform development dude, I can tell you that this is a nightmare that won’t be passing soon.

By keeping the course of its development unchanged, Adobe guarantees that their software will stay as stable as you’ve come to expect — and rely on — it to be. Apple has made it much more difficult, but the wizards at Adobe can cope.

BTW, I LOVE the idea of using AE 7 in XP via Bootcamp. Mac folks who haven’t dipped into Windows in a while will be pleasantly surprised at the speed and stability of AE in Windows, even on Apple hardware. And the differences between the usability of X and XP aren’t worth talking about anymore.

(Anyone noted the irony of Apple moving to command line interfaces even faster than MS has run away from them?)

Not meaning to start a platform war here — just making observations about how to solve a problem today, using solutions available today. Adobe has already told us its UB revs are coming, but especially if all you’re doing on the Windows side of the boot is using AE, it’s udderly painless.

Also observing that Adobe is right to make the hard choice. Better to do what’s right for its customers in the long run than stumble over Apple’s roadblocks. Better not to chase the quick buck that ultimately keeps them from achieving all of our mutual goals in a reasonable timeframe. The only way to get it right is to do it right.

Best,
Tim