Reports of the Death of DNx on Mac Might have been Premature

When news first appeared, in a knowledgebase article, that MacOS was going to be dropping some support for DNxHR, it sent ripples through certain sections of the film industry. DNx is a popular intermediate and finishing codec that, while created by Avid for Media Composer, is used in Premiere and Resolve and other applications on a daily basis by many filmmakers.  However, it's not supported by the newer AVFoundry video framework Apple released with 10.6, only with the older Quicktime framework (confusingly, the Application "Quicktime X" doesn't use the Quicktime Framework, it uses AVFoundry), and after Mojave Apple is ending support for the original quicktime framework.

Jon Chapell over at Digital Rebellion did a great dive into the transition away from 32-bit in general for Apple and made the prediction that this wouldn't be an issue for the bigger platforms (Resolve and Media Composer would write their own tools to keep DNx alive in future releases of MacOS), but that the bigger issue would be with smaller software companies tools no longer being able to rely on pre-written support from Apple. We're already seeing that prediction come true with Avid already announcing their plans for keeping DNx alive and well on future releases of MacOS.  Avid uses their own frameworks, no longer requiring the Quicktime Framework, and support for DNx formats will continue "using 64 bit compliant and performance-tuned libraries" within the software.

Apple also further explained the situation with an in depth Knowledge Base article launched on December 11, clarifying a full list of codecs that won't get support with the future OS release.  But, of course, this is OS support. Applications can always build their own support. Looking over the full list of codecs that will loose support, you can be confident that DNx will be supported since it has the support of a major software dev behind it. But the REDCode Quicktime decoder won't, largely since it's less needed now that most major applications can handle RED natively. In fact, as you can see below, REDCODE raw is even natively supported in AVFoundry.  Gluetools, while awesome, is also obscure enoguh it likely won't get updated.

And if you open one of these files in "Quicktime X," you get the signature "converting" window is it converts it to a format X can play. Which of course will make VLC one of the big winners through this transition; many of my students already think of it as the "default" video player, since X takes conversion time for so many formats while VLC just opens files right pu.

Tech Specs:

Codecs affected by the transition: