M1 vs. Intel Macs for After Effects

[Eric Santiago]

Apples and Oranges 🙂

Or soup to nuts…

Adobe works great on all of them.

Can you be more specific?

I use the following:

2103 Mac Pro D700 64GB RAM

2021 M1 Mac Book Por 16″

2019 Mac Pro (loaded)

HP (various models too many to list)

So none of the above are iMacs or Lenovos 🙂

[Matthew Woods]

I would say M1 (M2,M3) reigns supreme. After Effects was almost unusable on my 2017 iMac Pro. I could never get previews to playback reliably at full frame-rate no matter what I did. I had to export a movie just to preview my animations. Also, it crashed all the time. Now that I have an M2 MacBook Pro, and am running the Apple Silicon native version of AE, I am finally starting to love AE again. It’s snappier, previews fine, and has been very solid. I thank Apple for forcing Adobe to rewrite their ancient crumbling code. The only problem is plugin compatibility. I have several older plugins that won’t work in Apple Silicon Native. The biggest ones that I miss are the Trapcode Suite. Maxon has updated the the Red Giant plugins, but they are only available for Mac as part of an expensive subscription. I don’t do enough particle work to justify it. Trying to do without.