[Tom Morton]

I’ve been battling with various Windows machines for years… Moved to a new Mac some months ago, and the contrast is unreal… I’m on the latest version of Tahoe and no issues at all really…. stark contrast to using Adobe on Windows!!

[Tom Morton]

It’s been a while but I’ve just come back to this and tried out the tutorial – it works really well! Thanks very much for sharing 🙂

[Tom Morton]

2 years later and I still haven’t found a fix yet. I’ve just upgraded to version 2025 and now I also have Redshift, so I’m looking into this again now… Right now I’m exploring vertex maps and also the vertex color tag, this shows some promising results, but not sure if it’s going to be scalable for large projects.

[Tom Morton]

15 years ago there were some illegal hacks for this… now? nope. You need to verify your Adobe account to use AFX so you’d also need the creative cloud app to run alongside not to mention a ton of other processes that need to spawn with AFX, and AFX doesn’t run in a portable version.

Have you tried dual booting a library PC from a memory stick with a bootable ISO? This might be possible but faffy. Otherwise, try just talking to your school admin. You might find they’re not unreasonable, if you’re doing a side project I can’t see why they’d be against this… you might get permission to use it at certain times or in a certain place.

[Tom Morton]

I would tend to shoot it into ffmpeg and split it out into separate physical files personally, I find it more reliable to manage, and simplifies the workflow when I want to take it into Audition for further tweaking.

[Tom Morton]

Thanks for the reply, I’ll check this out later!

[Tom Morton]

+1 on Mads answer – best to use a file hosting platform for the purpose you describe, which maintains the integrity of the original file.

Youtube re-encodes all video that you upload, so whatever the file format, however many channels or metadata you have, it all gets normalised, so all audio channels get merged into a single stereo stream.

Also, downloading Youtube videos isn’t really good practise – officially it’s against their policies and although there are sites that will allow you to download youtube videos, generally it works by recording the input stream. By the time you’re video has been uploaded, re-encoded and normalised, streamed, recorded and downloaded again, you’re going to lose a lot of quality and detail.

[Tom Morton]

Personally, I’m not sure why there would be any problems? I have windows 11 and keep it fully up to date, and do 80% of my animation and 3D modelling in Visualize R20 which works without a single problem. I think it’s one of the most stable design programs I use, much more reliable then any Adobe program for instance, which makes my modelling work very enjoyable.

Windows also has backwards compatibility modes too so even if you run into an issue, you could run the program in “Windows 7” compatibility mode for instance. Just right click on the program file to do this, as per attached image. But I’ve never had to do this myself.

[Tom Morton]

+1 for Mads solution – I’ve tried to do exactly this in the past but even with a clean plate it’s difficult. Not to be pernickerty, but obviously the pixels themselves don’t “move”, they are static and just change color… so you can’t track pixel movement, you have to track changes to the pixel color… but unless you’re in highly controlled conditions – inside with no daylight leak, no moving shadow casts, static lighting etc – you’ll always have some change of color to a clean plate even if it’s a slight color cast or luma change… so then you need to add some margin of error into your difference key, which then leads to object edges having artifacts and losing clean edges…. I like the thinking and with some AI to help it out, it could be done i think…

Have you tried that magic mask in Davinci Resolve? Personally i think it does a better job then any of Adobe’s features.

[Tom Morton]

Personally, I have this sneaking suspicion that you could have 512GB of RAM, and After FX would still somehow manage to hit 99% usage…