From: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2018 2:10 AM
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] Lack of QuickTime + HAP codec support

Hap's not that old--it's an open-source project launched by Vidvox in 2013. It's niche, sure, but VR, theatrical projection, and signage all have a need for GPU-accelerated playback of very high-res video. (H.264 is the only codec with GPU support on lots of consumer devices, and it's limited to 4K.)

apple, and community leaders have for _years_ been saying QT32 and its codecs are going away. this has especially been true for the last year. I know I’ve posted this any number of times. if you have been ignoring the warnings, thats no one else’s fault. apple made it clear with the release of 10.12 and 10.13.0 this was happening. adobe could of been a bit more proactive in also repeating the apple message but… this is not a surprise.

On Jul 16, 2018, at 1:43 PM, Dennis Wilkins <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

 

Adobe tends to focus on stuff that benefits the most users, leaving niche stuff, like HAP, to third parties.

What I’m saying is that it was their decision to just drop all of the codecs at once without alerting their users; they could have posted an alert with a questionnaire years ago asking what codecs were needed by their users and make their decisions accordingly. This is just another case of Adobe not supporting it’s customers very well.

 

adobe has created or licensed any number of common codecs that come in QT from DV 25/50/100 thru Mpeg2 and ProRes, DNxHD and just added their own support for animation. its a respectable list of common codecs used in pro environments.  that said, the entire AC3 dolby stuff and not being able to install several versions of CS was a huge blunder and they should make a peace offering to dolby… 

 

as for HAP, its an oddball old codec and totally small niche. ya, its for some old creaky video playback hardware. well maybe its time the vendor for that hardware stepped up with a codec / encoder app to support their own hardware. its not like *they* didn’t also know this was coming.. or get with apple to create a proper 64bit AVfoundation component to support their products. while we’re at it, how about cinepak ? Mpeg1 ? h.263 ? sometimes you let the past be the past. you can always dual boot into an old flavor of OSX to encode it too… 

 

S

I’m all for third party software - After Effects would be irrelevant at this point without it. But should we really have to rely on third parties for multi-process rendering, sub-sample erode-dilate, etc. etc. Adobe makes a ton of money off of it's users, and then we have apologists saying “poor Adobe” while they take our money.

 

Lastly, this isn’t meant to imply that the After Effects development team sucks, it’s that they likely don’t have the resources necessary to do what is needed (another decision made by the management at Adobe, not Apple).

 

- Dennis

 

 

On Jul 16, 2018, at 11:20 AM, Jim Tierney <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

 

>> They are responsible for insuring support for the codecs that they offer in their apps.

 

So… they need to re-write/implement every codec that was available for Quicktime? You’re basically asking them to re-write Quicktime and I don’t think you understand how much work that would be. Adobe tends to focus on stuff that benefits the most users, leaving niche stuff, like HAP, to third parties. They can’t do everything, everyone wants. And it sounds like the AfterCodecs product has filled that gap. Although, you could just render it out and then use an older version of CC to transcode it.

 

Jim

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Jim Tierney

President

Digital Anarchy