Any headway on 10.9.3 and late 2013 Mac Pros?

[Jan Pfitzner]

Apple released the second beta of 10.9.4, build 13E16. Some people report that the problems with Adobe products and Resolve have gone away with this build, so keep your fingers crossed.

[Marc Wielage]

I think this is an Apple problem more than a Blackmagic problem. I would wait and live with 10.9.2 and then see what happens.

It’s been very, very common in the Avid/Digidesign world for people to be stuck on lower-release operating systems because of issues with current software. It rarely hurts to use a 6-month old OS unless you know for a fact that every program you use is compatible with the new OS. Is there some feature in 10.9.3 that is a deal killer?

[Dave Pickett]

I agree Marc that early adoption of OS updates is perilous. This was an auto update that I neglected to disable upon receiving the cylinder a few months ago. Mind those settings!
Hard to say exactly what is going on but 10.9.3 has caused similar problems for other pro users and the chatter is that it’s code relating to Open CL.
In practical terms, your session will grind to a halt a few scenes in. Then Resolve will not quit properly and then force quit ceases to function (as well as most other apps) and you end up hard booting. The next hurdle is renders that hang indefinitely. One workaround for renders that has kept me trudging has been to open a new session, import the media and use Color Trace. That process somehow unlocks the render demon.
Apple suggested migrating back to 10.9.2 which is my plan. There is also the 10.9.4 public beta gambit followed shortly by Resolve 11 itself.

Dave Pickett
Colorist
Spectrum Grading
http://www.davepickett.com
404-775-8519

[Jan Pfitzner]

Since 10.9.3 and 10.9.4 don’t have any “killer” improvements atleast to my workflow, I will stick with 10.9.2 as long as possible.

[Marc Wielage]

[Dave Pickett] “I agree Marc that early adoption of OS updates is perilous. This was an auto update that I neglected to disable upon receiving the cylinder a few months ago.”
As careful as I fool myself into thinking I am, the exact same thing happened to me! Luckily, I did have a system backup and was able to painstakingly revert back to 10.9.2. Still took me about 9-10 hours of screaming, yelling, and cursing, plus turning over furniture, screaming at the moon, stuff like that.

The villain is System Prefs -> App Store -> Automatically check for updates / Download newly available updates / install app updates / install system data files and security updates. Very dangerous.

I’m expecting that Resolve 11 will work with 10.9.3 off the bat, but I’ll be carefully reading the Recommended Configuration file first.

[Jan Pfitzner]

Maybe 10.9.4 will hit the AppStore in the same timeframe of Resolve and Premiere Pro – but since my Mac Pro runs pretty well on 10.9.2 as of now, considering updating has no sense at the moment imo.