[Ridley Walker]

[Mark Dobson] “One thing I thought strange in the presentation was that you could swing the back of the new Mac Pro towards you to connect cables. But if you have some connected already this will not work and you’ll have to lean over to see the pretty lights from behind.
“

Yup. Seems like the brilliant Jony Ives doesn’t actually use a MacPro as most of us do.

The machine looks like it will scream but at this point, when I upgrade from my current MacPro rig, I’m more likely to build a Hackintosh with Thunderbolt for the flexibility and expansion options it would provide.

[Ridley Walker]

I upgraded my macPro 5,1 to a flashed GTX 570, a roll-your-own Fusion drive and have all PCI slots full.

The new MacPro wold mean everything is a peripheral, lots of USB and TB Cables.

[Ridley Walker]

Or it could be the new G4 Cube. Sexy but doomed.

One of the benefits of the current MacPro design is housing the PCIe boards, HDDs/SSDs, the new design means everything a connected peripheral, a tangle of TB and USB cables.

[Ridley Walker]

Is the viewer set to Active Camera? What you describe can happen if the viewer is set to one of the orthographic views like Front.

[Ridley Walker]

Shy layers or nested Compostions.

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7e84a.html#WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7e60a

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7ed7a.html

[Ridley Walker]

Converting the MTS files to ProRes will increase the size. MTS is a long GOP format, ProRes is not.

Will it be faster? That depends on the version of After Effects and what exactly your’e doing. Since its a long GOP format, After Effects must decode the MTS files need to generate the frames. If you have time, convert the files to ProRes using Adobe Media Encoder.

[Ridley Walker]

Todd, that’s good to know. I was certain I got the same error message with my cache settings well below the 80% threshold, I must be mistaken.

[Ridley Walker]

[Engin Osmanovski] “So it won’t slow me down or cause unsafe storage issues as mentioned in the warning?

I hope i didn’t buy that ssd just for nothing.
“

Using the SSD as a cache in CS6 is a real benefit. The Global Performance cache is one of CS6’s best features.

I doubt you’ll have any “unsafe storage issues” at all. Don’t worry about it.

[Ridley Walker]

This issue has plagued me as well. I have a 120GB SSD dedicated solely as an After Effects Media cache. I’ve tried settings ranging for 50GB to 100GB for the cache and despite having an near empty drive, this warning appears. I’ve learned to ignore it without consequence.

On Adobe’s forum, Mylenium advises that it is not significant.

See: https://forums.adobe.com/message/5108678#5108678

[Ridley Walker]

I would say neither of these is a good choice. The iMac doesn’t have the requisite video card for 3D Ray Tracing at less than 1GB of memory, nor does the Mac mini.

To stay within your budget have you considered looking at a refurbished iMac from Apple? These are fully warranted machines that for all intents and purposes are new. Look for an i7 quad core processor and a 1GB nVidia card.

https://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/imac/27

The Fusion Drive, while great, won’t make a huge difference to After Effects performance which relies more on the CPU, # of cores, RAM before disk speed. It all really depends on where the bottlenecks for your projects are.

I have a roll-my-own fusion drive in my Mac Pro, the system boots quickly and applications launch very speedily but After Effects operates no faster than it did on a 7200 rpm drive.