Which New Mac for After Effects?

[Ridley Walker]

I would say neither of these is a good choice. The iMac doesn’t have the requisite video card for 3D Ray Tracing at less than 1GB of memory, nor does the Mac mini.

To stay within your budget have you considered looking at a refurbished iMac from Apple? These are fully warranted machines that for all intents and purposes are new. Look for an i7 quad core processor and a 1GB nVidia card.

https://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/imac/27

The Fusion Drive, while great, won’t make a huge difference to After Effects performance which relies more on the CPU, # of cores, RAM before disk speed. It all really depends on where the bottlenecks for your projects are.

I have a roll-my-own fusion drive in my Mac Pro, the system boots quickly and applications launch very speedily but After Effects operates no faster than it did on a 7200 rpm drive.

[Walter Soyka]

[Ridley Walker] “To stay within your budget have you considered looking at a refurbished iMac from Apple? These are fully warranted machines that for all intents and purposes are new.”

Fantastic suggestion.

I’ve bought four or five refurbed Macs from Apple over the years myself. They really are just like new — all of mine have even been cosmetically perfect. They are fully tested with the regular standard warranty and AppleCare available as you mentioned.

It’s a great solution on a budget.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Jason Schoenfeld]

Thanks Ridley and Walter for the great suggestions and info. I have looked into getting a refurbished mac and the drawback for me was the lack of fusion drive for the older iMac. But seeing that it really wouldn’t have a huge impact on AE performance I will definitely look into the option of getting a refurbished mac. Thanks again for the quick responses.

[Matt Campbell]

Walter/Ridley, I realize this is an older post, but what about the new iMacs. I understand the GeForce 780m isn’t supported either and CC now has an option to use anyway, but with CS6 and the GFX card text file hack, does this card work?

We’re looking to purchase 2 new workstations and am pushing hard for 2 new iMacs, but being asked to look into the Mac Mini’s. Which everything I’ve read, seems like its not a good option for a post production environment. However, I’ve visited a post facility recently and they’re using new iMacs as their work horses. They seem really pleased. Thoughts on both the GFX card thing and iMac vs Mini’s for post production?

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