Version 2
For support on Final Cut Pro, please visit Support for Sapphire for After Effects.
If you have a support question that is not answered by the information below, please click here.
Frequent questions:
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My floating license doesn't work. A watermark appears:
On Mac On linux - My serial number doesn't work. A watermark appears.
- Where can I find my diagnostics log file?
- How do I access the documentation?
- On Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, the Sapphire installer is failing.
- QMaster is not finding the plug-ins.
- I see strange artifacts in parts of the viewer image.
- I get an error: "The procedure entry point could not be located..."
- My Shake won't start after installing Sapphire.
- On linux, I can't find the GenArts tool tab.
- On linux, I don't see any plugin icons in the GenArts tool tab.
- I have problems with macros that use Sapphire plug-ins
- How can I uninstall Sapphire plug-ins?
How do I transfer my license?To transfer your serial number to a new machine, first uninstall Sapphire plug-ins from your old machine. During the uninstall, select the option to register that uninstall via the web. As long as the uninstall is successfully registered, you should then be able to install your serial number on the new machine. The license is cross-platform so you can transfer a serial number between Windows and Mac systems in this way. If you own a floating license or if uninstalling is not possible, please click here to request a license transfer.
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Version 1
If you have a support question that is not answered by the information below, please contact us at support@genarts.com.
For support on Final Cut Pro, please visit our FxPlug version of Sapphire instead.
Frequent issues:
-
My floating license doesn't work. A watermark appears:
On Mac On Linux or Irix -
My node-locked license doesn't work. A watermark appears:
On Mac On Linux or Irix - Will Sapphire plug-ins work with Shake 4.1 and Mac Intel?
- How do I access the online documentation?
- QMaster is not finding the plug-ins. {C}{C}{C}{C}
- I see strange artifacts in parts of the viewer image.
- I get an error: "The procedure entry point could not be located..."
- My Shake won't start after installing Sapphire.
- In Shake 3, Render Disk FlipBook does not find Sapphire plug-ins.
- On Linux, I can't find the GenArts tool tab.
- On Linux, I don't see any plugin icons in the GenArts tool tab.
- I have problems with Macros that use Sapphire plug-ins
- How can I uninstall Sapphire plug-ins?
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My floating license for Shake on Mac doesn't work. A watermark appears.
Sapphire version 2.0 works with Shake 4.1 and Mac Intel; you can download the trial version of v2 for Mac or Linux. Sapphire version 1 does not work with Shake 4.1 or on Intel Macs.
Online documentation for Sapphire plug-ins is normally installed on your machine along with the software and is available in HTML and PDF formats. It includes some general information about how to load and use plug-ins, and also includes a page for each effect with an example image, description of what each parameter does, and links to related effects. You can access this documentation directly from your workstation even if it is not connected to the Internet. On Mac, go to the Applications folder, double-click on GenArtsSapphireShake, and select View Online Documentation. On Linux or SGI Irix, point your HTML browser at file:/usr/genarts/sapphire-nreal/docs/intro.html. All Sapphire plug-ins also include a "Help" button in their parameter page that will bring up the online documentation in your HTML browser for the current plugin in use.
QMaster doesn't set up the system environment variables properly by default, so plug-ins may not be found even if they are properly installed on the render machines. The recommended solution is to create or update your .profile file in the home directory of the user that QMaster will log in as, by adding the following lines:
export NR_INCLUDE_PATH=/Applications/Shake/Shake.app/Contents/PlugIns export SAPPHIRE_NREAL_DIR=/Applications/GenArtsSapphireShake.app/Contents export GENARTS_LICENSE_FILE=$SAPPHIRE_NREAL_DIR/flexlm Do this on each render machine. Make sure the .profile file is saved as plain text. If you have any other plug-ins, also add them to NR_INCLUDE_PATH with a colon separator.
Make sure your "incremental update" mode is OFF. The little lightning bolt button on the middle left of the Shake GUI should be off. If the input image of a plugin node is smaller than its output, and you view the output while tweaking the input, only a subset of the viewed image will be updated unless the "incremental update" is off. This is a known Shake problem.
Make sure you have the correct version of Sapphire plug-ins for the version of Shake you are running. For example, Shake 2.4, 2.5, 3.0, and 3.01 all require different versions of plug-ins. If your versions seem to agree and you still see this error, please report it to us with your version details. Unfortunately, new versions of Shake are often incompatible with existing plug-ins.
If you are running Mac OS X Tiger, make sure you are running Sapphire 1.05 or greater. This problem can also occur if Shake tries to load two copies of Sapphire plug-ins. Make sure you only have one copy installed. Search for and remove any extra copies that you might have made. Also, make sure you have the correct version of Sapphire plug-ins for the version of Shake you are running.
In Shake 3.0, The Render Disk FlipBook preview does not look for plug-ins in the correct location. A workaround is to open a Terminal application on your Mac, and type the following two commands, exactly as shown:
cd /Applications/Shake3/shkqtv.app/Contents/PlugIns/startup Note that the last command ends with a space and then a period. Please contact Apple support for more details. This should be fixed in Shake 3.5.
On Linux, Irix, or Windows, if the GenArts tool tab does not appear in the Shake interface after you install Sapphire plug-ins, you probably need to set the NR_INCLUDE_PATH environment variable to properly include the /genarts/SapphireNReal/include directory. Check step 3 of the instructions provided on the download page for setting this on your system after you've run the installer. You may also need to log out and log back in again.
On Linux, Irix, or Windows, if you see only a row of funny little boxes or icons that all say "missing artwork" in the GenArts tab, you probably need set the NR_ICON_PATH environment variable to properly include the /genarts/SapphireNReal/icons directory. Check step 3 of the instructions provided on the download page for setting this on your system after you've run the installer. You may also need to log out and log back in again.
If you include a Sapphire plugin in a Shake macro and you want to expose a plug-in's popup button as a macro parameter, you need to quote and prepend a colon to the name in the macro .h file (name should become ": name"). Also, for any exposed popup-menu or radio-button parameters, you need to add their UIs manually to the macro UI .h file. As an example, S_LensFlare includes a popup lens parameter. This is represented internally by Shake as a string, so you need to put the parameter name in quotes and prepend a colon to it where it's used in the call to S_LensFlare. Here is a corrected macro .h file:
image MyLensFlare(
image Background=0,
int autoTrack=1,
const char *lens="anamorphicBlue",
float raysRotate=0,
float pivotX=.5*width,
float pivotY=.5*height
)
{
S_LensFlare1 = S_LensFlare(Background, 0, 1.01, autoTrack, ": lens",
.2*width, 1, raysRotate, 0, 0, pivotX, pivotY, .01*width,
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1);
return S_LensFlare1;
}
Then, to create the proper UI for the lens popup, and the autoTrack radio parameters, find the appropriate lines in the sapphire_nreal_UI.h file and copy them into your macro. On Mac, sapphire_nreal_UI.h is in /Applications/Shake2.5/shake.app/Contents/PlugIns/startup/ui/sapphire_nreal_UI.h. On Windows, it's in c:/Program Files/GenArts/SapphireNReal/include/startup/ui/sapphire_nreal_UI.h. On Linux and IRIX it's in /usr/genarts/sapphire-nreal/include/startup/ui. In this example, you will need to add the following lines to your macro's UI.h file, but replace MyMacro with your macro's name:
nuxDefMultiChoice("MyMacro.lens", sapphire_get_file_popup_names(0));
nuxDefRadioBtnOCtrl("MyMacro.autoTrack", 0, 1, 1, "0|No","1|Yes");
Then the macro should be usable.
On Mac: go to /Applications/GenArtsSapphireShake and double-click on Uninstall Sapphire Plug-ins.
On Linux: become root, and type the shell command:
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