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After Effects Machine: upgrading my 2010 Mac Pro
Hello Guys,
I’ve bought in 2011 a Mac Pro (2X6 core 2,66ghz Xeon), which I’ve upgraded over the time (3.0 USB, SSD’s, Nvidia 680 GTX). I’m reading on different forums that clock speed may be more important that number of cores for After Effects (my work is 80% 2d flat animation, sometimes a little 3D with Element, 10% compositing on big RED files and 10% RAW photography editing with Lightroom)
The problem is I don’t want to spend 10K on the new Mac Pro as it’s not as evolutive as my 2010 Mac pro, so I’m wondering if a full specs Imac 5K or a “New” Mac Pro 6 core at 3,5GHZ would be quicker than my 2010 Mac Pro for After Effects 2d stuff or should I keep my Mac Pro?
Thank you for your help!
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15 Replies
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Apple’s offerings right now for professional workstations are an embarrassment. I used to love Apple, but not for professional video work anymore. (I still like their phones/watches/other personal stuff though. And, for photographers, the iMac is still pretty great.)
I would suggest waiting until Apple announces something decent again or getting a Windows machine. You can get great bang for the buck with a PC. I just built a Windows workstation with more computing power than you can even order from Apple for around $1,000. Granted, that was with used parts, but it works great! You can order a brand new PC workstation that’s about half the cost of the same specs with Apple. And it’s more upgradeable in the future!
– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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I’ve thought about going to Windows but I just love the mac OS too much! I guess I’ll just throw a 980ti GTX in my old mac pro and get a 5K monitor to refresh my setup and wait for something decent from Apple, which may never come…
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If you have a mid-2010 Mac Pro, I think you’d be better off upgrading that. On the advice of a group of other guys doing the same thing, we all bought mid-2010s, 2×3.06 (or similar), 96GB ram, and the GTX 680 graphics card. We bought the boxes used from LA FX-house surplus, so they were in good shape (albeit rising in price!) Total price tag was around $5500 instead of a new Mac for $9000, which according to benchmark research, would be similar in performance.
(Note that I did this mid-2015).My only complaint has been that that GTX680 card was a bit of a loser, with lots of screen artifacting when it ran out of it’s 2GB memory.
My preferred life-cycle for my workstation is 3-4 years, so it’s hopefully a good stop-gap until Apple can give us a good sense of what kind of professional support we can expect in the future. If I find out that the iWatch chip is going into the new desktop model, it’ll be the end of my 25 year relationship with Apple!
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We bought some “new” Mac Pros at work recently. They are fairly decent and feel pretty fast for the most part but you can tell when performing certain actions that it’s using old tech. The new iMac we got a little while ago outperforms it at certain tasks.
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I’m not really happy with the GTX 680 either, gets messy really quick with those artefacts! I don’t know if it’s me but After Effects seems to become poorer and poorer since they cut off the multiprocessing stuff, that’s why I was thinking that maybe I should just upgrade to those fancy i7, the iMac 5K seems to work well for the 4k ish price tag: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
I wish Adobe could give a hint or two on the future of AE but I guess they’re busy updating CC which is currently really buggy on Sierra.
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Do you know on what kind of taks the iMac outperforms the new Mac Pro? Thank you!
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I’m afraid I can’t be very specific because I haven’t used the iMac that much. One thing I have noticed though is that there is a particular font we use for a client called Kirkwood that’s made up of lots and lots of little bits and pieces and using it on our old 2009 Mac Pros was a nightmare. It took forever to render and just modifying the text or changing its position took 5 – 10 seconds or more. The new Mac Pros are make this process far more tolerable but there is still a small amount of lag. The iMac just seems more responsive for this particular task to me. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.
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We’ll see if Apple announces anything at their event today.
– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Do I understand correctly that they only announced new MacBooks? Nothing on desktops?
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Nothing new for desktop, they have the balls to announce a Macbook “Pro” with 256go flash, 8GB RAM and an intel i5 2Ghz for only 1499$! Apple “Pro” term is definitely for “pro-sumer”
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