Building A New Workstation – Need Advice Pls

[Peter Van der zee]

Hi, Austen I’ll give it a go…

-The price difference is a lot bigger then the performance difference
I would invest in RAM instead of GHz
– the standard graphics card is fine and get 2 in there if you want to work with extra monitor
– The same harware is in the DELL monitors, half the price, same monitor…
– I think 32 GB of RAM is overdoing, 8 will work fine and 16 you’ll have more then enough
– In CS4 you can make an alias of the program and work with various copies at the time;
put one rendering and keep working on another copy. This can reduce working time a lot…
– The good deals are on the internet

I hope to be of any help

http://www.zeemotion.com

[Kevin Camp]

i’m in agreement with peter’s evalutation, but here are some links with benchmarks for ae (and other software) on various macs to help you make your own decision on number of cores and ram…

this one compares two 2.93ghz macs, a 4-core vs an 8-core:
https://www.barefeats.com/nehal08.html

here’s another with various mac and various ram amounts:
https://www.barefeats.com/nehal04.html

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Brendan Coots]

I would agree with all of this. Dell monitors are great, believe they use the same panels as Apple.

The best prices I’ve found for Mac Pros are at https://www.macmall.com, they are the same or less than ordering through Apple Business Pricing. Apple recently saw the writing on the wall and lowered the price of adding RAM to your build, but Other World Computing still has the cheapest mac RAM that I know of, and it works great. That said, 8-10k is a decent budget and you should probably just buy Apple’s RAM. If you ever need the machine serviced and there’s third party gear in your machine, they might not help you.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Joe Clay]

By the way, I just wanted to note that it’s possible to render while you work in other versions of AE. You can use the command line renderer, although you can’t render the same project you’re working in. I’m not sure that’s possible in CS4. I don’t have CS4 to check. 🙂

Joe Clay

Animator
gra-phix.com

[Kevin Camp]

there is also a gui script calle bg render that will render whatever is in the render queue, but render them in the background. it works in cs3-4 and there is a version for ae7 too.

you can check it out here if you are intersted:

https://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/#more-170

he also has a cool gui script called throttle, that will let you set to performance settings (like # of cpus and idle rendering) and a high quality par correction (no more jaggies), all from a docked panel.

there is a similar gui script called video preview throttle that allows you to tweak the video preview settings without going into the preferences, which is pretty useful too.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Austin Clarence]

Awesome! Thank you all so much. And I will definitely look into those AFX scripts.

I ended up going with a new 8 core mac pro. The 2.66, 16 gigs of memory, and a ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB card.

Now eventually, if these future gigs go, I am going to commit to one of those Flanders Scientific monitors. In the meantime, I want to get an HD monitor for cheap, that will do a “decent” job for playback. Any recommendations? And what connections should I use to hook it up? Maybe a black magic card with HDMI output?

thanks again guys,
A