After Effects + Mac Pro set up

[Kevin Camp]

either the 4-core or 8-core macrpro will be a significant upgrade to a g4 powerbook, but if you have the money to get the 8-core now then i think it will last you longer (hey, it’s 2x the processing power).

note that you will want to get more ram if you have more cores. i would recommend trying to achieve 2gb per core, so 16gb for an 8-core machine. you don’t have to get it all right now, but when you make your initial purchase keep in mind that since you only have 8 ram slots, you want to buy the ram upgrades in 2x2gb pairs so you will have room to add more 2x2gb pairs to achieve 16gb later. if you have less than 16gb of ram then there are ways to try and optimize performance and stability by limiting the number of cores available for ae’s multiprocessing… here’s a tech doc from adobe on how to manually do it, and here’s a cool script to do it form a panel in ae.

[Jeff Passetti] “RAID card”

it used to be that a fast drive was not much of a performance gain in ae, but with multiprocessing being better utilized in ae, the need for more data more quickly is becoming a factor. i will say that a raid card can improve performance do to the amount of read/write for files and caches that ae does. getting an external raid to go with a raid card will help even more. however, do not get apple’s raid card. if you want to set up a raid, you can get a better card for a lot less money. this is also something that you can set up later if you find that you are not getting good performance… for $800 you could get a sata2 pci host adapter, sata2 external 4 drive enclosure and 4 500gb bare drives for about the same price as apple’s raid card, and they will outperform it and you’ll have 2tb of storage.

[Jeff Passetti] “One 320GB 7200-rpm suffice?”

a 320gb internal hd is enough to get started. if you are working with sd or compressed hd (hdv, dvcprohd, etc) an easy, affordable, ‘pay-as-you-go’ option that would also help performance would be to get a firewire800 drive for your media. it can help performance by allowing you to use the internal drive for the disk cache and the external firewire drive for the media. this will split the load on the drive buses to 2 drive buses, the internal sata bus and the firewire bus. if you were to just add another internal drive for media, you’d have 2x the data load on the internal sata bus and that can start to cause performance issues and you may be better off disabling the disk cache.

[Jeff Passetti] “Graphics card”

i don’t have cs4, so i can’t speak for any benefits of opengl in cs4, but in cs3 opengl isn’t that much of an improvement if it helps at all… if you enable opengl for previews, you will lose multiprocessing for previews (it will still use mp for renders). opengl is also not used in most of ae’s bundled effects, so no big gain there (note that other 3rd party effects may make better use of opengl). plus opengl is kind of flakey in ae, so it can be more problematic than useful. i’ve found that i prefer to have it turned off, so a good graphics card for myself would have little effect on performance, but that’s your call…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jeff Passetti]

Kevin: Thank you for your response. Very informative. I appreciate the length and quality of your answers.

Couple follow-up questions:
1. Do you recommend me purchasing RAM from Apple? Or would you have a third-party site that you would recommend?

2. Where do I find “…for $800 you could get a sata2 pci host adapter, sata2 external 4 drive enclosure and 4 500gb bare drives for about the same price as apple’s raid card, and they will outperform it and you’ll have 2tb of storage” ?

3. What brand of firewire800 hard drives do you recommend?

4. I did not ask this earlier, but I was curious how many displays do you work on at your job? Do you recommend just using one display, or a combination of 2, or 3?

And I notice you work for KCRW. Quite possibly my favorite radio station in the country. And I live in the New York region, too. Kinda sad to see Nic Harcourt switch gigs on Morning Becomes Eclectic, but i’m excited for Jason Bentley, too.

Thanks Kevin.
-Jeff

[Kevin Camp]

[Jeff Passetti] “And I notice you work for KCRW”

actually it’s krcw, a tv station in portland oregon… i actually work in seattle, but there are 3 stations in the nw region owned by the same ownership, 2 in seattle and the 1 in portland, so we do work for all 3 from the seattle building.

as for ram, i’ve used otherworldcomputing.com/ (owc) for ram for the past few years and i’ve been very happy. i’ve never had nay problems with any of there ram on macs and they usually have good prices (much better than apple) and the ram meets or exceeds that sold by apple.

for a drive array and host adapter… here’s a sata2 pcie host adapter and 5 bay enclosure for $600 and 5x500gb bare drives for the enclosure for $85/drive… so that would total about $1000 for a 2.5 terabyte drive array that would achieve 320mb/sec which is about the max of the apple raid card. that was a quick search at b&h photo for a firmtek product that i’m familiar with, you can probably find better deals if you look.

as far as firewire drives, i can’t say i have a prefered brand, but i generally look for one of 2 things either a good quality aluminum enclosure (like many for owc) when i have the money or the cheapest one on sale at fry’s electronics.

and for displays, i used to prefer having 2 displays back when ae had all those floating panels, but when ae went to the docked panels, i’ve found i like just one display. however if you are going to work in 1080, you may want to get a very large monitor to be able to see the full size preview and the panels that you like to work with often, or get 2 displays…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jeff Passetti]

I’m an idiot, I read your company line in your signature way too fast, and I became way too excited, thinking you worked for the radio station. Which now makes sense, because why would a radio station want to utilize AE? Who knows. I apologize.

Thank you for all of your hardware recommendations. Truly appreciated.

Here’s what I plan on purchasing in the near future from Apple:

Mac Pro
-Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor
-2x1GB ram (with plans on purchasing more)
-No Apple RAID card
-(1) 320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive
-ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB Graphics Card
-One 16x SuperDrive
-AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi)
-Do I need a Fibre Channel Card?
-AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (will third-party RAM violate Apple care’s warranty plan?)

Perhaps from bhphotovideo.com:
-FirmTek SeriTek/5PM 5-Bay Host-Swap External eSATA Enclosure
-Western Digital 500GB Caviar GP 3.5″ Internal SATA Hard Drive for Desktops

Perhaps from https://www.otherworldcomputing.com/
16.0GB of RAM — am I reading correctly that a 16 GB set is $419.99?

Purchase elsewhere:
Purchase Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium.

Look for:
An external hard drive. How about the brand “Lacie?”

Do you recommend a specific size for a monitor? 20″? Should I go with Apple 20″ cinema display, or would you recommend a better non-Apple brand?

You’ve been very helpful. Once again, I thank you for your continued support. I’m new to the realm of AE and its hardware. But I plan on hitting the after burners as quickly as possible. I’m making a transition from being a flash animator to an AE + Flash motion graphics artist.
-Jeff

[Kevin Camp]

most things sound pretty good.

you don’t need a fiber channel card unless you are connecting to a fiber channel storage network (like an xsan). the built in ethernet will be fine for any other ethernet based networking need.

the apple care plan should not be effected by any typical third party upgrades, like ram or pci-e boards…

that ram looks good and that’s a pretty good price.

lacie seems as good as any for an external hard drive.

as far as the monitor, i have an apple 23″ display at work, and i like it quite a bit. but i have read some good reviews on similar large dell monitors that offer a greater contrast range and other features all for less money. i’ve also heard of many users that prefer them over the apple cinema displays. i don’t know any specific models, but you might look into what dell offers.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Colin Mcquillan]

Be sure the Dell monitors you look up to compare have pixel resolutions of 1900X1200 or greater.

I personally use dual 23″ Apple cinema displays (recently made unavailable from the apple store), and love that set up. It works great for me because I’m often using multiple programs simultaneously, and some of those programs are better served over two screens. If I was only in AE all day, i would be fine with a single display (along with a broadcast monitor of some sort).

I have also seen friends dell set-ups that look very nice, and they saved a few hundred bucks each or so over my set up…

Colin McQuillan
Van. B.C.

[Jared Picune]

[Jeff Passetti] “RAID card:
yes or no? “

Check out the CalDigit RAID Card which is currently on sale for $349. While there are a lot of options for storage out there, the CalDigit RAID Card provides 100% hardware RAID protection, which is ideal for AE because it has it’s own processor, so it doesn’t take away from the recourses of you workstation.

https://www.caldigit.com/RAIDCard/

Jared Picune
Denver Final Cut Pro UG
Geeky Mac | FCP Tips & Tricks