Isadora 2.5.2 and Mac OS High Sierra

mc_monte

Dear TroikaTronix Community and Isadora Users,

The TroikaTronix team has been busy testing our current Isadora release with MacOS High Sierra, which Apple released today.

If you're interested in a broad overview of the new features in High Sierra, please refer to Apple's official website or this MacWorld article which outlines the new features in High Sierra.

There are few areas where the changes in High Sierra are relevant to Isadora:

The new Apple File Structure. Our team can't really report conclusively on it's effects on day-to-day use yet, that's neither here nor there. We did record some issues with Isadora recognizing the file path to imported media when opening an Isadora file, but it appears to have been an Apple-side issue and been resolved for the Sierra release. We have not found an occurrence of this issue in our most recent testing.

Next, and perhaps most important, is the new Metal 2. According to Apple, Meta 2 provides better support for VR, 4k video resolutions, and.h265. We are interested in hearing more reports from those of you working with 4k video successfully, in detail. However, don't expect to run 4k video flawlessly or reliably quite yet.

We are investigating a few issues related to video playback in High Sierra with Isadora 2.5.2. This issues appear to be intermittent, and may be system specific. We do not recommend upgrading to High Sierra on a performance-critical computer at this time.

If you are interested in installing High Sierra on your machine to use Isadora 2.5.2, we recommend you back up your files and computer and create an external Mac startup disk on an external hard drive to test on your computer first. Follow these steps:

You'll need an external storage device. We recommend an external solid state drive. The Samsung T3 and T5 series drives are excellent for this purpose, with 256 GB external devices available for about $150 USD.
Once you have your drive, follow these instructions from Apple to create an external Mac startup disk.
Reboot your computer into the external startup disk. You'll need to "setup" this external disk. If you wish, you can actually use Apple's tools to copy the contents of your main computer storage onto the external device, if you have enough drive space. This is an excellent way to test "your computer" without compromising it permanently.
Once you've booted to the external drive and copied your data, you can now Update the External Disk to High Sierra using the Mac App Store.
Now, test drive Isadora on High Sierra, so you can make the right choice about updating your system now or later!

Please send your reports or get in touch with the tech team if you need help doing any of the above. We're here to help!

Cheers

Monty