October 8, 2012
by fcp.co
The visual programming tool Quartz Composer hasn’t received much love from the Apple team for a while. Should Apple finally kill it off, not only will it be the end for many popular QC based plugins for FCP, it could also be the end of Final Cut Pro 7 itself.
You might or might not have heard of Quartz Composer, but you’ve definitely seen it in action. From screen savers, to animations in Mac applications, to the internal plumbing of some FCP plugins, it has been the engine used for many cool graphic effects using the GPU.
Whilst it hasn’t received the dreaded ‘deprecated’ label yet, we have heard from a variety of sources that they think it won’t be in the next big furry OS X species. This has two large ramifications for Final Cut Pro 7 users.
First of all, there are many plugin writers who use Quartz Composer to build plugins not just for Final Cut Pro 7 but other apps such as FCPX and After Effects. In the latter years of legacy FCP, QC helped speed up plugins by transferring the image processing away from the CPU and onto the GPU. Some products from Noise Industries, CHV-Electronics and others will all cease to work or perform very badly if Quartz Composer insn’t a part of the next big cat.
Secondly and most importantly, there is some Quartz Composer internally in Final Cut Pro 7 which means if it dies, so will legacy FCP. This is the first big indication we have seen that FCP7 might not run on a new version of OS X.
Yes you read that right.
So why are Apple not developing Quartz Composer further and what can we do about it?
Quartz Composer started life as PixelShox Studio until it was absorbed into Apple with its creator Pierre-Oliver Latour. It was a perfect match for Apple as it was a very quick and easy way to design graphic animations that could be embedded into Cocoa or Carbon applications. Enter the iPhone and Apple’s OS convergence policy and because Quartz Compositions won’t run on an iPhone or iPad, you can see why it’s been overlooked.
Apple need to know that we would like Quartz Composer out of the intensive care unit and back for more years of happy healthy life. If you have an Apple Developer ID then please contact them and register your interest. This is super important if any products you sell utilise QC. One developer also mentions the need of support for OpenGL Core Profile including a migration path for existing Quartz Composer plug-ins to OpenGL Core Profile.
If you are not a developer, then please use Tweets, Facebook, carrier pigeons or whatever to get the message out there that QC musn’t die. The more activity Apple see on the subject, the more likely they will be to respond. A comment below would be good too.
Don’t let this be the reason why Final Cut Pro 7 finally gets put to bed.
