✦ Rosetta Guide (MacOS) ​

Starting in 2022, Adobe After Effects runs natively on Apple Silicon. While this brought massive performance improvements over older Intel Macs, it also introduced a compatibility issue where older or outdated plugins fail to load. Read below to learn more.

"The following plugins are installed, but are not yet compatible with this version of After Effects...” ​

You can easily fix this by enabling Rosetta. However, keep in mind that running After Effects under Rosetta will sacrifice some of the performance benefits of Apple Silicon. Ultimately, you'll need to decide whether plugin compatibility or maximum performance is more important for your workflow.

What is Rosetta? ​

Rosetta acts as a translation layer, allowing After Effects to run as if it were on an Intel Mac. Because After Effects acts as the host application, running it via Rosetta forces third-party plugins built only for Intel to run smoothly alongside it. The trade-off is that you will lose M1+ benefits and performance will ultimately drop, leading to slower speeds overall. Enabling Rosetta is a quick and simple process.

Important ​

  • Adobe removed the option to enable Rosetta in After Effects 2024 and later.
  • You may not need Rosetta depending on which plugins you plan to use, scroll down to learn which from our list have been updated to support Apple Silicon.

How to enable Rosetta ​

  1. Open Finder
  2. Go to Applications and open Adobe After Effects (this is a folder).
  3. Right click the application (.app) file INSIDE the folder and click Get Info.
  4. Under the General tab, checkmark Open using Rosetta.

You must follow these steps exactly. You won't be able to enable Rosetta through a desktop shortcut. Click here for a video. If the option to enable Rosetta is missing despite doing everything correctly (excluding After Effects 2024/2025 and Intel Macs, obviously), you may need to install Rosetta 2 using a command line.

  1. Open Terminal.
  2. Paste the following command:

sudo softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-licenseClick here for a video.

Which After Effects version should I install? ​

Main points:

  • After Effects 2021 and older are not compatible on MacOS 14.0+ and won't launch. If you're on MacOS 14 or higher, you must go with After Effects 2022 or newer (2023,2024..)

  • Starting in After Effects 2024, Adobe permanently removed the option to enable Rosetta meaning plugins only built for intel-macs are completely unusable in After Effects 2024 and higher, refer to plugin list below.

Enabling Rosetta can greatly drop performance, making it argubly not worth enabling for one or two plugins that you can easily substitute with something else.

Plugin M1+ Compatibility (List) ​

The following list is according to what is provided specifically on our site.

If you’re curious about a plugin that isn't mentioned, you can always look up the developer's release notes, see which version they added M1+ support for, and compare it with ours as versions are usually written in the file name.

Updated - (does not require Rosetta) ​

  • BCC
  • Crossphere Bokeh
  • Deep Glow
  • Dehancer
  • Element 3D
  • FilmConvert Nitrate
  • Glitchify
  • Magic Bullet Looks
  • Modulation
  • Omino
  • Optical Flares
  • Pixel Sorter
  • RSMB
  • Saber
  • Sapphire
  • Signal
  • Trapcode
  • Twixtor
  • Universe
  • VFX Suite Scripts and extensions are unaffected.

Not updated - (requires Rosetta) ​

  • Twitch (Video Copilot has not yet released an M1+ update)
  • Shooter Suite (Discontinued, never received an M1+ update)

If you don't plan to use any of the 'unsupported' plugins or agree that they are not worth the performance drop, then feel free to enjoy the latest versions of After Effects without any worry.