Ozone 4 public beta

[Phil]

Taking the tech from Vue 7, this should work an awful lot better. They also have revised their licensing to be far more user friendly. I'm encouraged.

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/ozone/ozone_4.0/

[prometheus]

aha..the ozone 4 beta has a thread also on general discussion posted earlier.
I posted some initial impressions and an image.

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97111

Michael

[Phil]

It's licensed per machine now. So you no longer have per-app licensing. A single install and license for one machine is good for any number of apps that you have, and which are supported.

You still need per-node licensing for distributed rendering, but again it's per-node, rather than per-app+per-node.

That's a huge change, and I'm happy about it. Now it would be nice to have render nodes free, admittedly, but the license for each render node is reasonably priced.

[Phil]

Is that a real difference? Isn't that the way it's been with Vue6 and Vue7? The license is attached to a machine ID - which i despise. I prefer a serial number (or dongle) that you can easily install on any machine you have. Do you still only have three activations before you must jump through hoops? What you've said so far does not appear to be any real improvement IMO. :(

Ozone 3 required you to have a license for each of Maya, LW, C4D and XSI. Per-machine. Even for render nodes.

Ozone 4 simply requires one license for each machine, including render nodes. That's it. If you have more than one application, it's a huge cost saving (unless they screw it up by charging a ridiculous price per license). For me, that's a significant saving compared to the Ozone 3 approach, whichever way I look at it. The render node discount is steep based on the fact that it's actually a full working license of Ozone - you can fire up LW on that render node and Ozone 3 will work without limitation. Ozone 4 looks to be similarly designed.

I'm also uncertain how they could make Ozone work with a dongle when not all of the supported apps run off a dongle. They've gone with a node-locked license - perhaps they will consider a license server *shrug* It's worth asking. The activation stuff is not so much activation as a verification. It's tied to the machine, but you don't need to be online once you have the information. I've reinstalled machines and used the original data with no issue - I simply backed up the Ozone license files and put them back afterwards. So far, I've had no issues to report in terms of the licensing control under Ozone 3.