Should I upgrade to Catalina or not?

[Mark A. Jaeger]

Late last Fall I made the mistake of upgrading Mac OS from Mojave 10.14.6 to Catalina on two computers. My Adobe applications instantly had lots of issues and were basically unworkable. Because I had not backed up the Mojave OS I needed to wipe the drives and reload Mojave. After some fun-filled hours I was back to where I was before Catalina feeling burned.

Since then I have shunned the offers from Apple to upgrade to Catalina and my editing life has been just fine.

So, for those of you that are running Catalina - Is it now compatible with the Adobe applications (esp. Premiere Pro and After Effects)? Did Apple and Adobe figure out a way to play together?

Please let me know your experience.

 

[Mike P.]

Preview and QuickTime are super inconsistent for me, especially preview (like the spacebar quick preview thing, not the app)... It's kinda infuriating; 50% of the time it just stops working and the preview screen/playback window is blank. They got rid of dashboard (or whatever it was called, where you'd swipe or push Fn-F12 and get widgets -- weather, calc, dictionary), which will also be an inconvenience if you used it (I did)... Of course all that stuff has been replaced, but I don't find the alternatives as fast/succinct in use. Also all Adobe CS6 (last standalone release) stuff stopped working completely for no reason (whereas it was fine on Mojave even though it wasn't supposed to work).

That being said, all the metal stuff with FCPX/Compressor absolutely crushes render times. The same R3D to any flavour codec (prores, h264, h265) is like ~10x faster than Resolve... And I'm not talking about Metal-assisted RED Decompression (I don't have the latest RED FCPX workflow installed), just in general... like even with prores to h265. I don't know what tricks they're pulling, but it literally took me 6mins to render out something that was taking ~1hour out of Resolve. I don't remember the differences being that drastic with Mojave.

I suppose that doesn't really answer your specific questions (Adobe CC, I presume), but I guess I'm saying that, if everything is working well for you now and you're *not* using any of the latest Apple software, I don't see the necessity... but again, I don't know if the latest CC releases utilize all the low-level Metal stuff and/or if it performs better as a result.

 

[Greg Fiske]

Don't know about compatibility, but make sure you do a backup. I had to wipe my drive because the install failed.