[James Benoit]

Unless you want to spend a long time building a 3D model of this theater, lighting it, texturing it, etc…I would just use what grant swanson said. Photoshop’s vanishing point will take the real texture and real lighting, and distort them in 3D space. And if you make your planes extremely complex, you will end up with a more realistic look than trying to build the model in 3D. After Effects will automatically distort and offset the perspective for you, so all you have to worry about is creating the planes in vanishing point; photoshop and after effects will do the rest!

[James Benoit]

[Steve Roberts] “For AE, just go for a midrange card. AE’s implementation of Open GL is not very good, so most of us just switch it off. As long as the card is supported by AE, it’s good.”

I disagree. OpenGL works great in AE as long as you have a workstation card, one tailored for video and 3D performance. You see, the mistake most people make when purchasing a workstation computer is to purchase a card that was actually meant for gaming, such as the Nvidia GeForce series, which are great cards, if your a gamer…

You see the gaming cards, such as the GeForce series are set up to render the whole screen in one shot, and thus have lower floating point calculations.

The Quadro cards are great for running multiple apps an processes simultaneously, and takes care of everything on your screen and UI for you.

The GPU is probably the most important consideration when considering a new workstation computer, and I’ve been working with AE for years. I agree with the first post, set the GPU at #1, and the CPU at #2.