Word on the Creative Cow forums this morning is that the newly released Apple Quicktime 7.4 upgrade causes a MAJOR problem with Adobe After Effects where the system crashes after 10 minutes or so of rendering. So far this has been confirmed on After Effects CS3 – not sure about previous versions. This is happening to multiple people and this occurs immediate after upgrading to Quicktime 7.4. Again, like with all Apple updates – DO NOT BE THE FIRST ONE TO UPGRADE. Wait until others do it and take time to read the forums and see what everyone else’s experiences are. This should be especially true with Quicktime as the last few releases have been unstable at best. This should be even more critical if you work under tight deadlines and absolutely NEED to deliver.

Here’s a link to the forum post. Hopefully Apple can take care of this one quickly: http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/925464

Update: I’m getting a lot of traffic here from Google from people who are having the same problems.  There seems to be no fix from Apple yet but some people have successfully downgraded from Quicktime 7.4 to Quicktime 7.3.1 and that should get you back to working. Here are the steps.

1. Download the older quicktime for your OS:
Panther: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731forpanther.html
Tiger: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731fortiger.html
Leopard: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731forleopard.html
2. Download and install the program Pacifist.
3. From Pacifist, install the Quicktime .pkg that you downloaded. Choose “Replace” instead of  “Actualize”

I’ve been told that this works and will downgrade you back to 7.3.1. This way you can wait to upgrade back up to 7.4 until Apple releases a more stable version. I haven’t actually done this myself since I never upgraded to 7.4 in the first place – so use this info at your own risk. Feel free to let me know the results.

-Paul