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after effects future releases and Mac compatability
I have been thinking of buying a Mac Pro for the last year, and only really want this for after effects.
I have waited to find out about Macs new snow leopard 64bit (due Sept) and MAC Pro with new chips and with upgradeable ram etc. At the moment after effects only uses 4Mg.
Does anyone know what Adobes plans are for using the new chips? using more ram? is it worth buying a new mac at all. I am using a mac book pro, (best of) 2 core etc.. So at best a new Mac will do no more than this one does.
Should I wait yet another year? Does anyone have any info on Adobes plans. i.e. CS5 ??????
Thanks for all your help
Anita Sancha. -
8 Replies
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I think it is a safe bet that even if anyone knows the answer, he or she will not be able to commit to answering in a public forum.
With regards to maximizing a Mac, it is also a safe bet that Apple’s products will get a leg up on anything that their competitors come up with.
If you really like the Mac and want a software solution that harnesses as much of the machine’s architecture then it’s quite difficult to choose anything other than what Apple churns out on the software side. If you want the best combination of hardware AND software then you will open up your options.
I’m seriously thinking of jumping onto the Mac bandwagon and using their software solutions. The local industry where I am situated at has a preference FCP. AE seems to have a leg up on Motion due to a lack of experienced personnel using Motion. However, I’m quite confident that I will be able to leverage what Motion has to and will continue to offer for broadcast design.
For now, keep your money close to you and make your decision at an opportune time. A decision that is based on industry demands and your skillset instead of putting faith into chips and wanting to be loyal to a company or software.
At the end of the day, most companies won’t give a diddly about you or what you have done for yourself or for themselves unless they want to. It is best that you think about yourself and your earning capacity – again based on industry demands and your current and expected future skills.
Cheers
RoRKbroadcastGEMs – AEPro Volume 02 (Professional Adobe After Effects Project Files – Now Available).
Adobe After Effects Training in South East Asia.
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Thanks..
So its hold fast and yet again into the wind… me harties!!!
Tide and time will tell .. its a waiting game.
Thanks for your contribution
Thanks for all your help
Anita Sancha. -
[anita sancha] “I am using a mac book pro, (best of) 2 core etc.. So at best a new Mac will do no more than this one does.”
I don’t know where you got this impression.
I have one of the new 8-core Mac Pros with 16GB of RAM installed. AE is a 32-bit application so each instance can only address 3GB of RAM, but I can launch up to 16 instances of AE on my machine (with hyperthreading on the new processors 8 cores are seen as 16 by AE) to render up to 16 frames simultaneously.
Of course, this uses all of the Mac Pros resources and makes it very unresponsive, so I generally only render using 6 of the 8 cores (12 frames simultaneously) and leave 2GB available to the rest of the system
I also have a Mac Book Pro with 4GB of RAM and the difference in render times between these two computers isn’t even comparable. I’d say it’s somewhere in the area of at least 10x faster on the Mac Pro.
The only reason I wouldn’t upgrade to a Mac Pro (assuming you have the money) is if you think the hardware itself is going to be refreshed soon.
Darby Edelen
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Hi… thanks.. Darby
I am now very confused. What do you mean by “instance”?
I thought that AE could only use up to 4GB of the ram and therefore a 16GB ram would be a waste of money and 12GB would be never used.
If I have a HD sized animation project with one 4000 framed comp (long… I know!) with say 3D layers, a light and a camera and say 2 adjustment layers and 10 layers of taga sequences. This takes me 50 mins to render out as yet another taga sequence. Can be previewed with difficulty..depending on resolution… in sections by moving the bar along and purge purge purge…. on a Mac book pro. 4GB 2 core 2.5ghz
The apple shop seems to know little about the working speeds of AE with their machines… so If I got a Mac pro how much easier will it be on animations of this sort of size please, any ideas, assuming using multiprocessing etc. 4 or 8 core, as I must have got my facts and understanding of AE’s needs. Are you saying that maybe my render would be 5 mins, instead of 50 mins referring to your quote of 10 x faster, cos that would be brilliant? What about previews?
Thanks muuuucho
Thanks for all your help
Anita Sancha. -
I can’t guarantee that it would be 10x faster, but it would definitely improve. The difference in rendering speed will vary from project to project. You should see if you can load the project on a ‘loaner’ Mac Pro and try rendering it.
When I say ‘instance’ I mean another instance of the renderer running the background (the ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ option in AE). Each instance of the renderer can address 3GB of RAM, and the number of instances is limited by the number of cores (dual core Mac Book Pro can have 2 instances, 8 core Mac Pro with hyperthreading could have 16 instances).
Here’s a link to more information on multi-processing:
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSDD65B476-971A-48e9-A5FD-D90E9A2B996E.html
Darby Edelen
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Thanks…greatly…. much clearer
Spent the afternoon testing previewing. Closed all programmes. With multiprocessing off 256 frames were previewed at full res. in 2 mins 5 secs. with it on was 1 min and 29secs. I played about with memory and cache as well, but enable disc cache did not make much difference only ram cache size seemed to.
So an 8 core and 16gb would seem to be much faster. But I could not estimate this but I assume 2 core (multiprocessed 4gb ram) is 1 min 29 secs then 8 core 16gB ram should be a quarter of that, but would not allow for longer than 256 frames previewed. (except by reducing resolution of course).
What difference does the processor make, they have very expensive upgrades to 2.9ghz etc.
Anita.
Thanks for all your help
Anita Sancha. -
Hi Anita,
Processor speed doesn’t help as much as the number of cores and LOTS of RAM in AE. Obviously a fast core will render that particular frame faster and more AE more responsive, but from what I’ve experienced there isn’t that much difference in a 2.66 vs 3.2GHz machine. I haven’t played with the New Nehalem Macs though, which it sounds like what Darby runs..so may make more difference with them?
As for the 10x faster thing…this totally depends on the complexity of the project and certain effects will whip through much faster and others (such as time-based effects: Timewarp, Twixtor, ReelSmart, etc) need to read the frames either side of it to build a render for that frame, so may be just as slow as with 1 x proc. You will DEFINITELY notice a speed increase using more procs though, just not across the board.
One thing I will say though – since using CS4 I have noticed previews, etc much faster than AE7, but the multi-proc option in AE totally hogs your system if you want to do anything else while you’re rendering..even if you leave a proc and some RAM free. Nucleo on the other hand seemed to manage this much better.
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