Activation is required?

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Scenario

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Activation is required?

PostMon Dec 31, 2018 6:31 pm

Happy New Year, folks!

I'm very excited to join the Blackmagic community today and to start comparing DaVinci Resolve with FCPx. My first question is, after installation I'm getting hounded by a window telling me that Activation is required for the Creative FX Collection Plus product. I'm assuming that's a plug-in. That window has three buttons Try, Quit and Activate. I don't really want to Try it now, I want to learn Resolve. But the Quit button doesn't seem to do anything. The window just keeps popping up again, over and over. If I Try it now, how long does that trial period last? (This is a poor initial experience, just FYI for you designers...)

Thanks,
Todd Ouzts
Scenario RETROfilm
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Brad Hurley

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Re: Activation is required?

PostMon Dec 31, 2018 7:52 pm

Unless you got your version of Resolve from a third-party source, that audio plugin collection shouldn't have been installed; it's not part of Resolve. It may have been installed with other software (it comes bundled with hardware for ProTools, for example) or the drivers for hardware you purchased such as a control surface. Where exactly did you get your copy of Resolve, and did you happen to buy an audio control surface recently as well?
Resolve 18 Studio, Mac Pro 3.0 GHz 8-core, 32 gigs RAM, dual AMD D700 GPU.
Audio I/O: Sound Devices USBPre-2
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Scenario

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Re: Activation is required?

PostWed Jan 02, 2019 6:21 pm

Hi Brad. No, I installed the free version directly from Blackmagic's website. I do own a ShuttlePro v2 for Final Cut Pro use, but I have no other AV control panels. Blackmagic should be made aware of this endless loop UI issue on first install.
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Brad Hurley

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Re: Activation is required?

PostWed Jan 02, 2019 7:11 pm

Scenario wrote:Hi Brad. No, I installed the free version directly from Blackmagic's website. I do own a ShuttlePro v2 for Final Cut Pro use, but I have no other AV control panels. Blackmagic should be made aware of this endless loop UI issue on first install.


I'm very skeptical that Blackmagic would have bundled any third party trial audio plugins with Resolve; they don't do that kind of thing even with the free version. It's much more likely to have been bundled with your ShuttlePro software or something else you recently installed. I've downloaded all the free versions of Resolve over the past year and none has ever come with third-party trial plugins; I just updated to 15.2.2 today and am not seeing these plugins or popups. You must have installed something else around the same time?

Are you using a DAW that would have installed these trial plugins? They're for audio, not video.

Another possibility is that you are using FX Factory or some other effects manager for FCPX and these got to your computer from there.

Last thing I can think of is whether you have a keyboard controller (piano style) for playing music; these plugins get bundled with the software for the Akai Advance 25 keyboard for example.
Resolve 18 Studio, Mac Pro 3.0 GHz 8-core, 32 gigs RAM, dual AMD D700 GPU.
Audio I/O: Sound Devices USBPre-2
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roger.magnusson

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Re: Activation is required?

PostThu Jan 03, 2019 11:32 pm

I would just remove the plugins. Brad is correct, they're not part of the Davinci Resolve download.

If you can't remove them, looking at their site it seems this product comes with around 30 plugins in AU and VST versions. Maybe click "Quit" 30x2 times and that will be it. After Resolve has started, go to Preferences > System > Audio Plugins and disable all those plugins so they don't try to load again.
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Brad Hurley

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Re: Activation is required?

PostFri Jan 04, 2019 11:36 am

And just to be clear: the reason you're seeing these popups when you launch Resolve is that by default Resolve attempts to load any existing Audio Unit and VST plugins on your system, since those can be used in Fairlight. So the likely scenario is that at some point in the past (even a few years ago) you installed some software that had these trial plugins included, but if you haven't ever used a DAW or other app that could use these plugins until now, you will have never seen these popups appear until you tried to launch Resolve.
Resolve 18 Studio, Mac Pro 3.0 GHz 8-core, 32 gigs RAM, dual AMD D700 GPU.
Audio I/O: Sound Devices USBPre-2
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Scenario

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Re: Activation is required?

PostSat Jan 19, 2019 10:01 pm

I just installed 15.2 hoping to get past this and got faced with the same train wreck. You guys are correct, those plug-ins were probably from Logic Pro X on my iMac Pro. But there should be a way to get past all of this to try out Resolve. Clearly these dialogs are triggered by Resolve trying to enable the plug-ins. But there is simply no way to dismiss them without signing up for some iLok account and committing to stuff that has nothing to do with trying out Resolve. Worse, you cannot quit Resolve once this barrage starts happening. You have to Force Quit it. There are at least 8 different dialogs that pop up, and I don't remember whether I actually use them or not in Logic. I suspect they were part of my Apple bundle because I've never been asked to register them before, and I think they were all functional there.
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Brad Hurley

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Re: Activation is required?

PostMon Jan 21, 2019 12:09 pm

Scenario wrote:I just installed 15.2 hoping to get past this and got faced with the same train wreck. You guys are correct, those plug-ins were probably from Logic Pro X on my iMac Pro. But there should be a way to get past all of this to try out Resolve.


I can guarantee they weren't from Logic Pro either unless you bought Logic from some source other than Apple; they must have come bundled with something else you bought in the last couple of years. I have Logic and no third-party plugins were installed with it. Regardless, there is indeed a way to stop this, it just involves finding those plugins in the Finder and deleting them.

When it starts up, Resolve dutifully scans your computer and attempts to load all VST and AU plugins that it finds on your system. That's a feature, not a bug: it means if you've intentionally installed any audio plugins, most of them will be available for use in Fairlight. So to fix the problem, all you need to do is remove the offending plugins from your system. That means you have to find them first.

Try this: in the finder (click on your desktop), hit shift-command-C to open your Computer folder. Now double-click on the icon for Macintosh HD or whatever you called your main hard disk/ssd drive. Look for a folder called Library, and within the Library folder look for a folder called Audio. You should see a few subfolders, one of which should be called Plug-Ins. See if the plugins are there; if so you can delete them (be sure you're deleting only the plugins you don't want; I don't know the names of all of the Creative FX Collection plugins but most if not all of them have names that start with AIR, such as AIRReverb. They might be in the VST or VST3 subfolder, check each folder to see if you can find them.

It's important that you open the Library folder that appears when you open your Macintosh HD folder. If you just type shift-command-L from the finder you'll open the user Library folder, which likely won't contain these plugins.

If that doesn't work, look in the library to see if Creative FX Collection Plus has its own library folder and get rid of that. Sometimes plugins are located in the Application Support folder. Or use the search box in the finder to search for "AIRReverb" and see if that locates them.

If none of that works, contact the company that sells these plugins: https://www.airmusictech.com/support and ask them how to remove them from your system.
Resolve 18 Studio, Mac Pro 3.0 GHz 8-core, 32 gigs RAM, dual AMD D700 GPU.
Audio I/O: Sound Devices USBPre-2

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