Adobe reverses course, says Metal support in After Effects 'one possibility' [u]

Despite promises at this June's Worldwide Developers Conference hosted by Apple, Adobe is now adopting an ambiguous stance on whether After Effects will support Apple's Metal graphics technology.

"We are currently exploring various technologies for GPU acceleration, and Metal is one possibility, but we have made no commitment to any specific GPU acceleration technology at this time," said Adobe's Todd Kopriva in an official forum post.

During the WWDC keynote Adobe helped demonstrate Metal for Mac, and an engineer promised that the company was "committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications," other examples including Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.

Kopriva — the leader of the After Effects team — suggested that what was shown was "the result of one experiment." He admitted, however, that the WWDC presentation "sent a confusing message."

Metal is a developer API intended to allow better access to graphics processing hardware. Though it originally debuted in iOS 8, the technology is now a part of OS X El Capitan, released last week. It could in theory bring major performance improvements to games and graphics-heavy productivity apps like After Effects.

Update: David McGavran, Adobe's director of engineering for professional audio and video, said in a follow-up statement that while the company is committed to the Mac platform, it tries to set realistic expectations as to when specific product advancements come to market. He reiterated Adobe's comments from June, saying, "Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications, such as Illustrator and After Effects I showed you today, as well as Photoshop and Premiere Pro. We are very excited to see what Metal can do for our Creative Cloud users."