Studio Artist is a fantastic piece of software- by far best in class. However, it has not really been updated in years, particularly for the Win 10 environment. This is unusual for the software world. It is conspicuous that queries on this forum regarding updates generally go unanswered.
It is my fear that Studio Artist is/will become become a "dead" product. I am sure many on this forum would greatly appreciate a "sign of life", that development is going on an updates will be coming. Yes or no?
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We're working on future proofing the Studio Artist codebase. So the plan is to get the existing code in a form that will better weather future os changes. That is an ongoing effort.
We're also working on a new underlying effects processing framework that is using bleeding edge new technology. Again, looking for developing and using underlying code frameworks that will hopefully last for many years.
We're also looking at heavily leveraging some very actively developed open source libraries. As opposed to relying on specific platform features (we're talking about you apple) that will most likely be killed off or abandoned in a few years.
We make a specific point of not pre announcing new releases until they are finished. There are numerous factors (some totally beyond our control) that influence when things get fully finished. So that is why queries regarding updates here currently are given somewhat nebulous answers. When software is finished and ready to be purchased, then we will make a lot of noise about it, not before. And the focus is on finished, not just releasing whatever to meet some arbitrary date.
So yes, active development is going on. But we're keeping a very low profile as far as discussing that until things are in finished forms.
Windows was probably a second class citizen here in the past, since we had a long history of mac development as a company, had primarily mac customers, and used almost exclusively macs for our own personal work. So yes, we're aware that our windows customers would like to see a 64 bit build for windows. Framework compatibility issues prevented that from happening in V5.
Other then 64 bit app support, and support for better movie file io, i'm not aware of any real existing win 10 issues. 64 bit support would address the virtual memory limitations that can lead to lack of working memory with large canvas sizes on windows in the existing 32 bit windows app.
If there are other windows issues specific to win 10 you have an issue with or feel we should be addressing, by all means feel free to point them out.
If we didn't have to rewrite major portions of our application's code every few years because companies like apple computer goes out of their way to kill off or change code apis for essentially arbitrary marketing reasons, we'd have more time to focus on adding new functionality and new features.
Thanks- this is encouraging, although (1) I hope we live long enough to see the updates and (2) the Apple problems give more reason to push harder on Win development. Win rarely creates downward compatibility changes with OS updates.
Thanks again!
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Yes, i agree about windows not going out of their way to cripple and shut down existing software on the platform (unlike apple). And the big api piece on windows we use that did stop being supported was again apple's fault (quicktime for windows).
The joke is that quicktime for windows still keeps working fine on windows even though apple shut down supporting it. But apple is such a 'small' company that the thought of them putting an engineer or 2 on maintaining bug fix support for a cross platform multi-media standard they promoted to developers and customers, i mean how could apple possibly pay to support that. ha,ha,ha,groan...
Largest capitalization of any company and they can't be bothered to spend the small amount of money needed to continue supporting their own standards? Shows how much they love their long time existing developers and customers, oh wait, they don't care about them at all really.
Agree. That's why I switched to Windows!
I just went thru the same with the company I work for.
Our application was heavily based on QT on both Mac and PC (and 32bit).
Now we have AV foundation, and DirectShow/Windows Media Foundation.. and a 64 bit code base :)
Other popular opensource video frameworks had questionable licensing. (codecs and the motion picture industry) which we weren't willing to risk. Although it would have been nice to use a single api.
I wish you the best of luck, its a tough migration many of us were hit with.
If you need some beta testing.. I'm happy to help. (I get a lot of practice :)
The virtual memory limitations you can sort of get round them, by using what ever picture you choose and what ever preset, just let It render.
Don’t touch It or the virtual memory limitations will start up, and it usually freezes or crashes.
Just let It render, then port It Into Photoshop or Gimp and do your thing.
Undo buffers can take up a lot of virtual memory. You can adjust the number of undo steps (and associated memory buffers) in the mina preferences dialog. Reducing the # of undos can help quite a bit if you are running into memory allocation issues.
So it is fascinating to come back to this post a year later. And yeah, a lot has changed on the Synthetik end as we work to finish up all the niggly details in SA V5.5. Which i think addresses most of the key issues discussed here. I will give a more detailed reply when i get more time, which is probably going to be a few days at least. So bear with us as we focus on finishing things up.
The whole M1 ARM chip issue on the mac adds a whole new dimension to this conversation as well. Whatever issues i may have with the BigSur software (and i have some), apple seriously delivered on these new ARM chips. We were watching Gallery Show runs pound through some serious processing on a M1 powerbook mac last night.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how virtual memory actually works on these new machines. When contrasted to sitting in a memory profiler on Catalina running on an intel cpu for example.
And yes SA V5.5 is running in Rosetta 2 right now. We are looking at SA V6 builds to get to full native compiles.
Anyway, i hope all of this activity brings you some piece of mind for an exciting future for Studio Artist over the coming years.