Mac AE plugin: 32/64-bit fat binary not possible

[Pauli_Ojala]

The After Effects CS5 SDK Guide makes the following claim:

"On Mac OS, the 32-bit and 64-bit plug-ins can be combined into a fat binary, using the Mac OS tool ‘lipo’."

In practice it doesn't seem to be possible to create a single Mac plugin bundle that would be compatible with both 32-bit CS4 and 64-bit CS5.

Combining the binaries using lipo does work, but the problem is that there's a single resource file, and CS4 and CS5 require different values for "AE_Effect_Spec_Version" in the PiPL.

Changing the required spec version value for CS4 compatibility causes a crash in CS5, and vice versa.

[Zac Lam]

Hi Pauli,

After Effects supports multiple PiPLs in a single binary.  As you discovered, the CS5 and pre-CS5 versions will require separate PiPLs with different version numbers.  Some developers have been able to create a single binary by building the 64-bit version using the CS5 SDK headers, and the 32-bit version using an earlier SDK, and then lipo the two together to create a single binary.  Note that multiple PiPLs are not officially supported in Premiere Pro, so Premiere Pro will need separate binaries.

Hope this helps,

Zac

[Pauli_Ojala]

Hi Zac, thanks for the reply.

How exactly does one combine multiple PiPLs in one binary?

As far as I can tell, the PiPL resource is compiled into "MyPlugin.rsrc", located in the plugin bundle's Contents/Resources directory. While lipo can be used to combine the actual executables, this doesn't work for .rsrc files... What am I missing?

[Zac Lam]

Hi Pauli,

Have you tried including multiple .r files with differently numbered PiPLs directly in one of your binaries, then using lipo to fold your other binary into it?