Expiriences with the iMac

[Steve Bentley]

I’ve got both Mac and PC’s sitting in front of me and I’m a die hard Mac guy from way back…. but. If you look at cost/performace its hard to stay in the Mac camp. We recently added a new big box to our arsenal with specs like 24 cores, running overclocked at nearly 4 ghz, 128gb of Ram and a not-too-big Nvidia. On the PC side that came in around $4500. On the Mac side it was pushing $12k!
As for the graphics card, while there are more and more features in AE taking advantage of the myriad Cuda cores on Nvidia, it’s really the Ray tracing in Ae’s 3D world that uses them. I think for Particular it’s just the preview in the new Designer area that uses the cores. I haven’t seen a huge difference in render times in the comp. For the kind of work we do we’ve found more physical cores have been better than more Cuda cores.
Re stuttering – We did have shredding problems on the big box at the beginning with Nvidia – and that was a first for us after dozens and dozens of Nvidia cards. It turned out to be a monitor incompatibility in one case and a digital vs analong DVI input in another. The Nvidia guys are stupid smart so you shouldn’t see any issues. If you do it’s probably not the card. Make sure to download the latest drivers from Nvidia and not from your card manufacturer.

[Dennis Squadrazzino]

Thanks for your answers. Yes, i intend to continue use CS6. I’ve worked with CC, but i did not see a lot of features that make me want to have the subscription model (which i don’t like by the way).

Steve, as far as i heard, After Effects is not really taking advantage of a lot of cores. So it’s great to see hear from your hands-on experiences with more cores.

It’s the mix of great display and reasonable power that caught my eye on the iMac.

I was thinking about buying the 27″iMac (4,2 GHz Quad‑Core i7, 512 GB SSD, Radeon Pro 580 (8 GB),8 GB 2400 MHz DDR4) and replace
the RAM on my own with a lot more RAM.

Considering that i also need a new monitor i thought it was not a too bad idea, but after your posts I’m struggeling.

It’s a hard decision, so I’d love to hear from some hands-on experiences.
If you have any other tips for a system that would fit my needs (Motion Graphics, Trapcode, 4k Editing, Photoshop drawing, nice Monitor) I’d also be happy to hear about that- even if it your personal favorite laptop or something like that.

I’m not a “Pro”Mac person, but i had a lot slow-down times when working on a clients Windows machine. But maybe it was not configured optimal (After Effects freezing, updates when i did not need them etc.).

[Steve Bentley]

We’ll if you are going to say with CS6 keep in mind that it won’t saturate either the processor or the ram like newer versions will. I don’t remember if it was finally in AE2017 or 2018 but the first time I saw all my procs pegged and the ram filled to the brim I almost cried – finally after all these years! Now if they could just get their memory management system sorted, and y’know a proper paint.
If only adobe owned a preeminent paint package they could maybe borrow from.

[Dennis Squadrazzino]

Thanks you both for your answers. I still have the installation image for Yosemite, so i’m planning to use Yosemite on the iMac, if there is a problem. CS6 seems to have several issues on High Sierra. Not an ideal situation, but I really don’t want to go with CC.

Maybe i will switch to Windows. Hope there will be a competitor for Adobe and After Effects soon!

[Steve Bentley]

Re: Competitors to AE – Um, there is and have been for quite a while – although not at the same price point – Fusion, Nuke, Flame, Inferno, Shake, Natron, Combustion, Mistika; take your pick.