[Jeff Passetti]

I’m an idiot, I read your company line in your signature way too fast, and I became way too excited, thinking you worked for the radio station. Which now makes sense, because why would a radio station want to utilize AE? Who knows. I apologize.

Thank you for all of your hardware recommendations. Truly appreciated.

Here’s what I plan on purchasing in the near future from Apple:

Mac Pro
-Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor
-2x1GB ram (with plans on purchasing more)
-No Apple RAID card
-(1) 320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive
-ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB Graphics Card
-One 16x SuperDrive
-AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi)
-Do I need a Fibre Channel Card?
-AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (will third-party RAM violate Apple care’s warranty plan?)

Perhaps from bhphotovideo.com:
-FirmTek SeriTek/5PM 5-Bay Host-Swap External eSATA Enclosure
-Western Digital 500GB Caviar GP 3.5″ Internal SATA Hard Drive for Desktops

Perhaps from https://www.otherworldcomputing.com/
16.0GB of RAM — am I reading correctly that a 16 GB set is $419.99?

Purchase elsewhere:
Purchase Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium.

Look for:
An external hard drive. How about the brand “Lacie?”

Do you recommend a specific size for a monitor? 20″? Should I go with Apple 20″ cinema display, or would you recommend a better non-Apple brand?

You’ve been very helpful. Once again, I thank you for your continued support. I’m new to the realm of AE and its hardware. But I plan on hitting the after burners as quickly as possible. I’m making a transition from being a flash animator to an AE + Flash motion graphics artist.
-Jeff

[Jeff Passetti]

Kevin: Thank you for your response. Very informative. I appreciate the length and quality of your answers.

Couple follow-up questions:
1. Do you recommend me purchasing RAM from Apple? Or would you have a third-party site that you would recommend?

2. Where do I find “…for $800 you could get a sata2 pci host adapter, sata2 external 4 drive enclosure and 4 500gb bare drives for about the same price as apple’s raid card, and they will outperform it and you’ll have 2tb of storage” ?

3. What brand of firewire800 hard drives do you recommend?

4. I did not ask this earlier, but I was curious how many displays do you work on at your job? Do you recommend just using one display, or a combination of 2, or 3?

And I notice you work for KCRW. Quite possibly my favorite radio station in the country. And I live in the New York region, too. Kinda sad to see Nic Harcourt switch gigs on Morning Becomes Eclectic, but i’m excited for Jason Bentley, too.

Thanks Kevin.
-Jeff