After Effects on Mac Book Pro

[Brian Charles]

It depends on the sort of work you intend to do, what you are accustomed to, the version of AE you are using and many other factors.

In general a laptop will not provide the horsepower or memory to work efficiently. However there are many who use laptops and comfortable with their performance, I’m sure you’ll hear opinions on either side of the question.

The new MBP’s can be configured with 8GB of RAM which helps previews, the i7 processor is fast and can be used for multi-processing.

You mention C4D, you can download CineBench from Maxon and test the speed of the machine before you buy.

I find AE slow on an 8 core Xeon with 16 GB of RAM.

[Jason Myres]

“I find AE slow on an 8 core Xeon with 16 GB of RAM.”

If that’s slow, what’s fast?

JM

[Brian Charles]

Fast depends on what you are trying to accomplish. OK, so the 8 core is reasonably fast, still renders can take time depending on their contents, effects, number of layers.

I just finished a NTSC DV Widescreen 3 minute render that took 2.5 hours in CS4 using Nucleo Pro fast render settings.

If its just a simple text animation, that can render faster than real time. YMMV.

[Todd Kopriva]

I am happy with After Effects CS5 on my MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM when I’m doing basic design work and roughing out animations, but I’m much happier with my HP desktop workstation with 24GB of RAM when I want to RAM preview things at full resolution and do final renders.

So, yes, a laptop is great… up to a point. You can get by with nothing but a laptop, as long as you also have a _lot_ of patience and are disciplined and plan and think ahead. By that last part, I mean that you need to do a lot more prerendering, making tradeoffs about what you’re previewing at any given time, etc. (See “Improve performance”.)

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Rory Flynn]

Hi guys,

thanks for all your responses. I am currently using CS4 on a 5 year old pc. Its a HP Pavillion m7000 series. Pentium D 3.20 GHZ, 4gb ram, 512mb graphics memory. So I am not used to high speeds. Its pretty slow, but I’m used to it now. I suppose what I am really asking is. Will MBP be any slower or will I find it faster?

Cheers

Rory