Can you explain what exactly this menu item does? Does it "bless" old presets that don't work with current versions of SA or something totally different? I haven't tried it yet as it comes with a pretty stern warning. I am hoping it does indeed bless old presets because there are a bunch of them that I would sure like to play with in the latest version of SA. Thanks!
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In general you can just import your old presets in to the latest version and things work.
What those 2 menu commands do is open and then save either the entire preset collection, or the particular folder you are pointing at if you are running that one.
We jokingly called this the 'magical blessing' a few months ago in an old post.
Because it touches all of the presets you are pointing it at, we suggest you back everything up before you run it, in case some weird problem happens. Weird problem might be the power goes out, or you read in some horrible damaged old presets that then trashes memory in Studio Artist and it then starts writing out garbage (maybe?, maybe not?). So that is why the warnings are there.
So why might you want to do this (or not)? I will explain below.
The issue to be aware of is that some of them might point at old brush images or movie files that they use, and if that old Studio Artist main folder they lived in is still on your computer, then when you try to open that old preset in V5.5.5, it will try and load in the old image or movie file referenced in the preset file (because that old asset still lives on your hard disk). If Studio Artist cannot find the old asset file reference on your computer, then it searches in the Brush folder in whatever Studio Artist folder is associated with the particular version of Studio Artist you are running (so that would most likely be V5.5.5 at this point since it is the latest version).
None of the V5.5 versions can read old quicktime formats that are no longer supported. And any old movie brush presets that were made pre V5.5 are going to reference old quicktime format movie files that can no longer be opened in V5.5. We can thank apple for creating this mess, they could have approached this whole thing very differently.
So if those old movie file brush assets are still on your computer, then V5.5.5 will try and open them when you import the old preset, and they will not open. So a movie source brush should revert to a computational brush if this occurs.
Another problem like this is that a lot of old image brushes used psd files as the image reference, and we no longer support that file format because we used quicktime api to do it.
We converted all of the old movie file and image file assets we include in the Brush folder in V5.5 releases to appropriate formats that V5.5 versions can read in our V5.5 Studio Artist folders.
If you are doing this yourself, what we suggest is to change the name of the old Studio Artist folder (so add an underbar or some other character to the beginning of the name before you run in the 'blessing' command. that way the old brush asset file references will not be valid, and the exported 'blessed' presets will reference the assets found in the Brush folder associated with the current version of the program you are using.
Super old presets did not have preset icons IFF components in the preset file. The preset icon lived in the old apple resource fork of the file in those old presets. resource and data forks are ancient history at this point in the apple universe, apple only supports data forks these days. So running the 'blessing' would add new preset icon IFF chunks to the outputted preset file based on the old resource fork ones (assuming you ran this command on a version of mac os that still supported resource forks, and you were running a version of Studio Artist that could still read them (V5 32 bit flavor would be the last one).
This was all done long ago for the factory presets we ship (and have shipped since V4, so that original V4 factory preset collection included all of the old V1,V2,V3,V3.5 factory presets converted over to V4 format).
If you still have super old presets that are truly pre-V4 format, then you would need to run the 'blessing' command (or manually open than then save them) in 32 bit V5 on Mojave (or earlier) flavor mac os.
We run into a situation here especially where we have folders of presets that were made with beta versions of Studio Artist of various historical flavors. Sometimes these presets might be 'damaged' in some way. Usually it has to do with what is written out begin out of synch with internal type flags used in the presets format and checked internally when the preset is imported. So importing these old damaged presets might screw with memory in a way that can ultimately lead to problems later on as the program runs.
But if you can successfully import them, and then immediately export them in the correct format, then you get rid of the problem. Hence the 'magical blessing' part. We used this to take some old damaged V5 presets and make them run in V5.5 properly after they were converted.
I keep saying i will post the complete kitchen sink collection of factory presets i have that includes everything from all of the various Studio Artist releases. So i will endeavor to do that at some point this fall, and then make it available for interested folks as a download link. The issue is that the huge collection also includes folders labeled 'problem presets', 'crash issues', 'ridiculously slow', etc. And there are a few folders that are from various users who want them to remain private for whatever reasons, so i want to honor that. So i have to do a clean up pass before i just make it available for general consumption.
Thanks for the great, comprehensive reply! That certainly clears up any questions that I have.
Well I should have said that sorta, kinda, clears up my questions but... well you know. Anyway I've got SA v5 32 bit up and running on my old iMac under High Sierra and all the old presets I have are in a folder "my Brushes"/Richard's Brushes 1, 2, 3 (1/2/3 are sub-folders full of brushes).The icons are visible and I've gone through most of them and they work as expected. So that's good because they are very old. Now since there are so many brushes (and I really want to play with most of them) will I have to export each individually or is there a short cut to batching them out of 5 in a workable format? I see the update/old preset factory library and the update/old preset folder in the menu and from reading your reply through again you indicate that one of them (or both?) should work which brings up another question. Can the folders be "active" (meaning I can see the presets in the SA menu or do they need to be closed (located in a different location) so the update blessing works. Or, will my folder hierarchy in and of itself screw things up? I apologize for being kinda slow on the uptake. Most of the apps I've used usually open a dialog box so that you can target a specific folder. SInce we are in Studio Artist I'm gonna assume that things will work a bit differently :-). Again apologies for my lack of understanding and I certainly appreciate your help.
Update : Update Old Preset Folder does let you specify a single folder for conversion. It could have sub-nested folders inside of it. Everything will be read in and and then written out with the latest formatting.
If you are using brush image file or movie file assets referenced in the presets, then you will need to move them over to your Brush folder in Studio Artist V5.5.5 folder. And they all need to be things that Studio Artist V5.5.5 can actually read. So images like jpg,png,tiff,bmp are fine. Psd is not.
For movie brushes you want H264. Any old animation codec ones are not going to work wince apple provides no way to open or work with them anymore.
If your preset brush assets cannot be read it, then you need to convert them into something that will.
Where is the "Update : Update Old Preset Folder" command? I can't seem to find it anywhere
Huh. I'm using the latest version (5.5.5) and it doesn't show up for me. Thanks MAX
It's probably not accessible there on windows because windows people don't have old presets from V1, V2, V3, V3.5, and we originally put it in primarily for people to update old presets to have the new preset icon iff chunks directly in the preset data fork.
There was this assumption that anyone with old presets had a mac and was going to do the conversions up to the latest format before moving them over to windows.
We can look to turning it on whenever we do the next windows build. I guess it might be useful to windows folks if they have old presets pointing at old quicktime brush assets and they still have a V5 folder installed on their windows computer.
For people moving old mac presets to windows, we found that just converting the old quicktime brush assets once in Mojave was not enough, since the Mojave quicktime player output them in some mov format that was not playable on windows. We had to then open them in Studio Artist on Catalina and then export them again to get them into a mov format that would play on windows.
Also, windows is more picky about file names (forbidden characters that work on mac, and a more restrictive mac number of characters in a path name. So if you are converting an entire old factory preset collection for windows you will run into that as well.
Oh ok, thanks John!
Success! I targeted each folder individually and SA processed them just fine. Playing with them now in SA 5.5.5 and I gotta say it's great to look back at some of the really old stuff. I plan to build off some of them for future use as well as figuring out exactly how I built them (man, was it really that long ago that I started using Studio Artist?). They are simple presets built in SA so nothing funky to deal with. Even though I had to spend some time getting SA 5 restored to the old iMac it was worth it! Thanks again.