[Jamesc]

So… you need to buy a new Mac but have to buy a second hand old one just to run AE?

The rest of the Adobe software wasn’t written for Intel either – and that’s pretty slow on Intel Macs too…

So… if you are an Adobe user – and want to buy a new Mac… you can’t?

[Jamesc]

Last year I needed to buy a machine – I was all set to go Apple until I realised AE7 ran soooooooooooooo bad on it.

I was soooo glad I made that decision when I went to use AE on a quad intel thingy – awful! My duo core 1.66Ghz laptop out runs that thing! I can’t believe people even put up with it…

[Jamesc]

You can kind of half do this with a Digital Anarchy plugin already 🙂

But this certainly seems quite cool

[Jamesc]

Oh – and as for text etc – it’s fine.

It may be that Apples anti-alias all the text – where as XP doesn’t as default do this.

However if you go in to Display settings and find ClearType – you can turn that on.

It’s actually superior to the Apple anti-aliasing!

[Jamesc]

The Apple displays are beautiful – pretty much the best you can get.

Hideously expensive though – not value for money – but the best for sure.

Suggest you check pcpro.co.uk and go to the Labs section – they reviewed a whole load of them a few months back.

I didn’t buy them – they’re my monitors here at work – everyone is Mac apart from me.

I am surprised that they didn’t make them 64 bit – madness!

I expect that nVidia will be ok with Vista drivers – I hope…

[Jamesc]

I kind of agree – I was hoping for better expressions etc – at least a decent editor etc Maybe they have improved it (wouldn’t be hard) and not telling me about it. The only thing I can see is that they’ve added masks and a few other bits that can now be controlled by expressions. And colourSampler()…

Most exciting thing I can see is multiprocessor support – which is really good because I’m running a quad xeon – but apart from that nothing much excites!

Oh – and you can stroke a mask – but probably won’t be as good as Trapcodes 3D Stroke

[Jamesc]

I should point out that it’s a Dell system – not an Apple!

Running Windows XP Pro (must upgrade to 64 bit soon though)

I do use Maya and 3dsmax also.

I am guessing the best choice is whatever Quadro card slots in to my budget.

[Jamesc]

Well today I noticed that a few MP4 files were slowing things down massively – I had about 5 movie files in one comp and it was having a problem. I converted them to H264 (the movies are quite small so compression wasn’t a worry – we’re not talking full screen here) and the comp previewed much quicker.

The MP4 files were also making AE crash occasionally (via the delights of Quicktime) on my WinXP machine – having converted them to H264 there was no so much problem.

I wonder if a targa seq or suchlike is read in natively rather than through a codec – and might speed things up or else make things easier for AE? (more chance for it to decide to crash if it’s using Quicktime etc etc – not that it does all that often)

[Jamesc]

Just wondering which is best for AE as it tends to need to read single frames rather than sequences – now I know most video compression isn’t going to take days to decompress as it has to do that on the fly – but I would think that something like an MP4 is a bad thing. Animation codec – surely AE has to read xx number of frames before the one it wants to use.

I’d imagine one that scrubs quickly in a player is best – and worst would be one that uses 25 (or however many) frames to make up an image like MPEG.

I was really wondering if there would be an advantage to uncompressed targa sequences. AE only has to decompress them and then store them uncompressed anyway.

[Jamesc]

I want to draw curves in 3D using equations – only for my own playing.

In the end I’ve gone for using Particular and a layer emmiter.