[Nevin Styre]

I too have noticed maximum render quality resulting in missing effects.

In one project I had a segment where I had a clip with a track matte from a text layer & a drop shadow on the clip. So it should have looked like the text was punched out of the video with a drop shadow on the text, and that’s what it looked like in my viewer and when rendering from the previews without max quality. When I rendered maximum quality the shadow would not show up in the render.

This was on a mac pro with a non-cuda card

[Nevin Styre]

Even if it worked I would have to go back and modify a large number of sequences. I’m probably better off doing the rendering through AE at the end of the day & just leave my machine going after work.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen ME mess up an output compared to what it should be rendered as, it seems to have a mind of its own sometimes.

[Nevin Styre]

After Effects CS6 will use all the CUDA cores from multiple GPUs to do raytracing rendering, there is definitely a benefit if you do a fair amount of raytracing.

[Nevin Styre]

While my main system is now PC and 99% adobe there are still needs for a mac(looking at the retina). Dealing daily with content that comes in from different companies & sources a lot of the time formats are mac specific, instead of dropping dough on a bunch of plugins and quicktime codecs so I can view the content on my PC it makes more sense to put that money towards a mac that will read it natively & also give me the option of portability that my PC tower setup is missing. Workstation PC laptops are similar priced without high-res screens and gaming PC laptops are way too bulky with TN panel screens for the most part, apple still has the notebook crown. And if I do have some footage that I need on PC(IE xdcam in a quicktime container) I can transcode to prores with the macbook. It also helps that my creative cloud subscription allows 2 installs and is cross platform.

[Nevin Styre]

AFAIK the quadro 4000 does not work in the mac pro 1,1.

[Nevin Styre]

Try copying the vector and pasting it into a photoshop document with transparent background, then save as a PNG through photoshop.

[Nevin Styre]

I know exactly what you are speaking of because it just happened to me yesterday for the first time. Rendering a specific sequence over a minute long, switch to my web browser, a few seconds later I get the Ding that my render is finished(obviously finished way too soon), check the render queue and it says the render completed successfully when it really did not, only about 10-15% actually rendered. I double checked the in/outs and what the duration that was supposed to render and they were set properly. Restarting AE in my case seemed to fix the issue & the sequence rendered fully after.

CS6

[Nevin Styre]

The bubble doesn’t show up when displaying your bins as thumbnails, but if you don’t like browsing your bins as thumbnails that might not help. With CS6’s hover scrub thumbnails I’ve started to go through bins this way.

[Nevin Styre]

I like the western digital black edition drives. Fast, robust and made to handle intensive read/write applications.

[Nevin Styre]

radeon cards aren’t supported, only a couple radeon GPUs for OSX in last year’s macbook pro’s are supported.
A little homework before purchasing and you would have found you needed an nvidia cuda-capable card.

The following cards are officially supprted:

GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac OS)
GeForce GTX 470 (Windows)
GeForce GTX 570 (Windows)
GeForce GTX 580 (Windows)
NVIDIA® Tesla C2075 card (Windows) when paired with a Quadro card as part of an NVIDIA Maximus™ configuration
Quadro FX 3700M (Windows)
Quadro FX 3800 (Windows)
Quadro FX 3800M (Windows)
Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro FX 5800 (Windows)
Quadro 2000 (Windows)
Quadro 2000D (Windows)
Quadro 2000M (Windows)
Quadro 3000M (Windows)
Quadro 4000 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro 4000M (Windows)
Quadro 5000 (Windows)
Quadro 5000M (Windows)
Quadro 5010M (Windows)
Quadro 6000 (Windows)
Quadro CX (Windows)
Tesla C2075** (Windows)
AMD Radeon HD 6750M (only on MacBook Pro computers running OS X Lion (10.7.x) with a minimum of 1GB VRAM)
AMD Radeon HD 6770M (only on MacBook Pro computers running OS X Lion (10.7.x) with a minimum of 1GB VRAM)

Many other nvidia cards will work with a small change to a text file, for the most part they work just as good as supported cards however adobe can’t guarantee their performance since they only test cards on the list.