Leopard Takes a Bite Out of Adobe

Time Machine, Quick Look, iChat Screen Sharing: If you’re a Mac user, there are lots of good reasons to upgrade to OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” Apple’s new operating system. But there’s also a good reason to hold off: Adobe’s professional video apps aren’t yet fully compatible.

Mac users love to upgrade their systems. After all, new versions of the operating system don’t cost $300 and they don’t take an IT department to install properly. But if you’re a video editor and you use Adobe, you should know that Adobe’s pro video CS3 tools won’t yet work perfectly under the new OS.

In a PDF FAQ posted to the Adobe site, the company says that Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3 Professional, Encore CS3, and Soundbooth CS3 are all not yet fully compatible. The company plans to make updates for all four applications available via download in December.

When the updates are available, users can get them automatically by relying on the Adobe Updater utility that’s installed automatically with Adobe apps. Adobe Updater will check for new versions and notify the user when they’re available. Users can also manually check for updates by selecting Help and then Check for Updates in any Adobe app.

So how incompatible are the pro video apps? Not that much, says Adobe. In fact, it thinks that few users will encounter problems. In its FAQ on the subject, Adobe says: “Our testing revealed a few issues in specific workflows when running the video professional applications on Mac OS X Leopard. Many video professionals would not encounter these issues on a day-to-day basis, but we want to provide updates in December 2007 to address these issues and meet our standards of quality.”

Updates will be available for English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish versions in December. Adobe has no plans up provide Leopard compatibility updates for CS2 applications.

For more on Adobe’s updating plans, download this PDF.
This article was first published on WebVideoUniverse.com.