[Christine Edwards]

If anyone has any remaining advice it’s much appreciated. Shld I buy either:
A)MacBook Pro 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel
8GB (2 x 4GB) of 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM
750GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory

pros-grfx card is supported for MPE
cons- known to overheat and crash AE, possibley need to be replaced in a few years

B)Mac Pro 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel One 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor
6GB (3 x 2GB) of 1066MHz DDR3 ECC memory
1TB Serial ATA 7200 rpm
ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 memory

pros- faster CPU, more longevity so better investment
con – grfx card not supported so I’d probably have to purchase a Quadro 4000 adding anthr $750 to total cost

I’m attracted to the laptop for portability, lower price and space saving, but I haven’t bought a new computer since 2007, so maybe I shld go for the longevity and feel current for longer? I know they will both fly compared to my 2007 MBPro, but it all seems like a pretty big chunk of $ to go into lightly, especially since I’ll need to purchase new Adobe bundles/and or subscribe to the Creative Cloud.
Anyone’s 2 cents wld be helpful. I won’t be working on the machine every day all day, but when I do it will be for heavy compositing and chroma keying.
thanks again.

[Christine Edwards]

yikes! has anyone else been experiencing overheating? guess I’ll google that now. whats the best solution to staying Apple, go for the Mac Pro tower and loose the portability? i guess if one is going to spend over $2000 it makes sense to invest in something that will be around for awhile. why does the PC OS have to be so ugly, plus my IT friend says they get viruses all the time and that I’d need to install protection software that wld slow the computer down.

[Christine Edwards]

great news thanks so much

[Christine Edwards]

ahh I never thought to apply the loop expression to anything but a nested comp. Now it seems so obvious!
I think I’ve got all your suggestions figured out (except slider control-but i’ll worry about that later).
thanks for all the help.

[Christine Edwards]

Hello, well I’ve done some reading and experimenting but I’m not very familiar with expressions so I need some basic help. In order to simplify I’ve created a comp that’s 20 frames long where I animated a solid square with my bezier distort. Then I dropped this comp into another one called “sway” with a duration of 3 sec where one of my trees is a layer. I need the distort movement to last the new duration so I used time remapping and a “loop out cycle” expression (the only expression I’m familiar with). All good so far. I add bezier distort to my tree layer with the intent of using the pickwick to link to the solid layers distort movement. Here’s my first problem. I cannot add an expression to the whole Bezier property (it’s grayed out). So I guess I have to add expressions to both the upper left vertex and upper right vertex independently? And if that’s so what do I pickwick these vertexes to since my distort movement source is a precomp and has only time remapping?

[Christine Edwards]

Thank you for the response! I’ve used null objects before and a little of the wiggler, but i’ve never used slider controls. So I need to do some research/help menu reading before I give this a go. Happy to know that there is a way to create a master effect and slave layers to it!