First gen BMD ATEM Switchers no longer supported on 7.4+

I'm not sure if anyone noticed all first gen ATEM switchers are no longer supported after 7.3.
Thanks Blackmagic for the warnings and information in your always sub par change list of 7.4 & 7.5.
This will of course be a major pain for any company with a mixture of perfectly good 1st gen gear and newer switchers. We have 4 original switchers and 2 newer, still supported, models - can't wait to have to juggle version installs/upgrade/downgrades both in the warehouse and at shows as you can only have either/or 7.3 or newer ATEM software installed.

Got the same issues myself.

The other issues are which versions will run under the newer OS X


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I would like to know why they discontinued support for the older switcher
I would have liked a little notice

I am still waiting for the Timecode in/out on the ATEM 2 m/e that I purchased new!
I still have the original packaging and it says its a feature right there on the front.

Perhaps they could offer good trade-ins on products they sell with missing features they lose interested in?

I noticed the end of firmware notice too. Honestly these panels are fairly old, not sure what current and future patches can do to make the panel work better or what’s left to improve within their limits. I’d say BM supported the panels far longer than they have with other products.

The problem for us is that we have a range of ATEM gear and a lot of computers that go out on jobs.
I'm not really concerned for bug fixes as the old stuff is pretty solid - its the fact we'll now have to have specific computers for the newer gear and ones for the older stuff - a total pain in the ass and is just asking to catch you out at a gig.
There is few things more enjoyable than having to do a firmware upgrade/downgrade on site after a returned dry hire had been upgraded/downgraded.

I’ll give you that point for sure, since I had to downgrade a panel for my old
Base station yesterday at a job site. That mostly reinforced my desire to drop a few grand on the newer gear

Same problem here. Now I have to make sure I have install files for 7.3 and the latest on my laptop. This is not good. Blackmagic please let us use these old switchers with the latest firmware. You don't have to add features to them, but 1 version of the software for all switchers please.

Simple answer: as we too own several versions of Atem hardware employed in different sites and jobs.

Keep both vers. in the downloads folder of each and every pc your gonna be using with an atem.

If your using older designs install the older software, if your using never hardware load up the newer releases.

If your running both / several then... yeah ur screwed

But. this isn't anything new, all companies will drop support on older gear at some point.
Although it would of been nice to know.

I write the software for the Grass valley control panels (as well as other ATEM control stuff) and it is compatible across all versions of ATEM firmware.
Baz