If you have disabled Adobe Updater – and I wouldn’t blame you if you had – you may not be aware that Adobe recently released a maintenance upgrade to After Effects CS4. Known as version 9.0.2, it contains a lot of bug fixes (including a cure for the crash-if-script-UI-open bug I reported earlier), plus a few new features:

• the ability to import XDCAM HD footage as Avid-style MXF files
• a text preference that can help work around the case where After Effects may crash after rendering 10 minutes of content to a QuickTime movie (although long-time user Matt Silverman says this is a red herring; the real cause of the bug is duplicating and rendering an Output Module that overwrites an existing QuickTime file)
• for RED users, there are big changes to the workflow, including that RED settings are now managed in the Interpret Footage setting per file, rather than as a global setting

Todd Kopriva – documentation master for After Effects (and all around nice guy) – lays out all of the details of the bug fixes and the new RED workflow in his blog. It is an easier read than the official 9.0.2 release notes. If you are a RED user, make sure you remove any prior version of the RED plug-in you may have installed before trying to run 9.0.2, and install the new REDCODE 1.7 importer instead.

I’ve been running 9.0.2 (sans RED support) for a couple of days now, and all seems fine. Some have reported losing their authorization, but that was another red herring; this problem happened to those who were using a pre-release serial number (legitimately or otherwise), which happened to expire May 31 – right around the time 9.0.2 came out.

To download the update, boot After Effects, go to the Help menu, and choose Updates. (You will need to then quit After Effects for Adobe Updater to actually install the update.)

By the way, a lot of these bug fixes were made possible thanks to those who enabled Adobe Crash Reporter when they installed After Effects. No one likes to think someone else is snooping around their computer and sending messages back to their own site, but in this case Adobe Crash Reporter was a force for good, not evil. (Unlike Adobe Updater, which is a necessary evil – as this update has shown.)

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