After Effects Machine: upgrading my 2010 Mac Pro

[Michael Szalapski]

To be fair, the higher end MacBook Pros do look really nice and I really do like that Touch Bar thing they’ve added to it. Anything to keep my hands on the keyboard area and out of the menus is beneficial.

– 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.

[Tom Smith]

I’ve finally bought a gtx 960 card and a 4k display, which will be my last upgrade on my beloved Mac Pro Tower. I’ve been really impressed with the performance of the 960 gtx on 4k editing, it’s night and day vs my 680!

[Matthew Woods]

I’m kind of in the same boat. I have been unhappy with Apple’s anorexic design product design of recent years.

I tried windows and hated it. We bought a ProMax tower that has been advertised on this website a lot. I spent more time with IT problems than I did working. We finally installed linux on it and are using it as a server.

I use a top of the line fully loaded late 2013 iMac and an older 12 core mac pro tower (upgraded SSD, graphics card etc). The mac pro tower still does very well for a machine of its age, and I love the hardware design. So easy to get in there and upgrade things. That said, I feel the iMac outperforms the pro tower for most tasks except those where raw processing horsepower is required. If you have to encode a lot of 4k Proxy’s the horsepower on the old Pro tower is your friend. Back when multiprocessing was important in AE, the pro-tower performed better, but now that Adobe has removed that from the latest versions of AE, I feel that the iMac is faster.

I would probably recommend an iMac for your tasks. It is the most bang for your buck in Apple’s offerings. You can buy a new one in a few years for the same price as a more expensive machine now. It has a really nice display. Thunderbolt is really nice. I have a Pegasus thunderbolt 2 raid for my storage that has been running great for 3 years now.

I am a little intrigued by the touch bar on the new macbook pro. I want to see what Adobe does with it in AE and Premiere. I’m not happy with the 16Gb memory limit, but from what I have read, the SSD in those machines is so fast that it makes up for the lack of memory. If your SSD is as fast as the ram itself, why would you need a lot of memory? I’m waiting to hear from user experience and benchmarks. I’m also not happy with only the USB C ports, but as someone who for the most part would keep it parked in one place, connected to a bunch of monitors and peripherals, it doesn’t bother me too much. There are some nice docks out there for all the cables, and it would be nice to occasionally take my machine with me.

My 2 cents,

-Matt

Check out 9 Slice Scale.
A way to scale graphics while preserving the border and corners.
An FxFactory Plugin for AE, Premiere, Motion and FCP.
https://monadnock.org/9slice/

[Tom Smith]

2 shops where I freelance sometimes have upgraded from Mac Pro towers to iMac 27″ maxed out recently for 2D animators, the guy in charge told me it’s the best investment for a great power/price for this kind of tasks. Owner told me he tried Windows machines for Photoshop Illustrator and AE freelancers, but there were too many complaints of bugs, crashes etc. so they kept macOS.

[Francis Jose]

Hi Szalam,

I’m looking to buy a new pc for working on adobe after effects and Cinema 4D. Could you suggest the best and latest configuration PC, GPU etc.

I really want to scroll the timeline without much lag and be able to render faster. Budget is 1500$.
Could you Please suggest best pc rig for the same?