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January 28, 2008
After Effects Users Fucked by QuickTime 7.4
If you use After Effects on a Mac, and in the last week you began to wonder why you can’t finish any render that lasts more than 10 minutes or so because you get this message:
you are probably very frustrated by now. An answer seems to have emerged in this Creative Cow thread. The only real option you have to fix this is: (1 Download this software called Pacifist and install it. Now go to Apple, and download the previous version of QuickTime, 7.3.1. from here. Once you have that, mount it so that the .pkg file comes up. Now Open Pacifist, and instruct it to open that .pkg file, and follow the instructions to install. When it finds previously existing files as it installs, always tell it to “Replace”.
After that you should be back to 7.3.1. What apparently happened is some kind of DRM shit introduced into the new QuickTime, presumably for some iTunes Store function, is refusing you access (permissions) to your .mov file AS IT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF BEING RENDERED OUT OF AE. Hahahaha. Ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is that apart from the method described above, there is no way to downgrade QuickTime to a previous version. The only other alternative is to reinstall Mac OS from zero and refuse to update QuickTime.
There is one other workaround solution which is to do all your AE renders as Targa sequence (no DRM on Targa for now, so it shouldn’t quit out). But then you will have to re-import the sequence and render as a .mov. (If it goes quickly then you will avoid the permissions error as it usually comes up after a render has been running for about 10 minutes.)
This is a small problem, but it makes you think about what could happen if something worse were to go down. You realize that through some stupid bug, Apple could take down some whole industry. Hopefully they are getting enough flack from the motion graphics and effects community to be motivated to fix this shit with a new update fast.
Posted by shane at January 28, 2008 12:29 PM