Migration from Imac to Mac Studio

When the M1 chip came out, I bought the bare minimum Mac Mini to start running some tests. It took a few tests, and I was running in Rosetta, but the Mac Mini was faster than my iMac Pro on many types of projects. Hangups and slowdowns came from certain file types and quite a few 3rd party plugins. 

I have moved on to an M1 Macbook Pro, and almost all of my 3rd party plugins have been updated to Universal (M1 Compliant). Nearly all of my VFX work and compositing is faster than any other system I have used. It just took some housekeeping and a little care with source footage codecs. I do a fair amount of transcoding when dealing with H.264 or H.265 footage. I often have to roll back one or two versions using the Creative Cloud app when builds cause problems. Right now, everything is running fine. I'm using Mocha Pro to Motion Stabilize some 8K clips, and it's slow, but the processing and rendering time isn't as slow as I expected. The same shot as a 4K proxy takes about  6-seconds a frame to process, so I expected about 48 seconds a frame with the 8K clip because 8K is eight times more pixels than 4K. It turns out that the 8K shot is rendering at about 34 seconds a frame. I think that's pretty good. 

Try rolling back a few versions, then roll forward. Make sure all 3rd party apps, plugins, scripts, and extensions are updated, or remove them and try a few different workflows. I suggest you get a 1 or 2 TB external Thunderbolt SSD and use that as your Cache folder for all Adobe apps. I have this one with this drive inside. It has a read/write speed significantly faster than any other external drive I have tried. I initially bought it with the basic Mac Mini I purchased to test Adobe apps because it only had 256 GB of internal storage. I installed the entire Creative Cloud suite on the external drive and banged on everything for about six months before I updated my MacBook Pro.

I hope some of these suggestions help. 

Hi Retina5E81,

This is strange!

Could you share a screenshot of the About This Mac and a screenshot of the screen where After Effects shows the ATI GPU is being used?

We're here to help.

Thanks,

Nishu

Current versions are just bad, bad, bad. no way around it. Apparently the devs struggle with All that new-fangled Apple M1 stuff and it doesn't help that OS X appears in a constant state of flux as well these days. If you feel like it, try to install a previous version of AE with Rosetta 2 emulation enabled. That way you can at least get soem work done without being a hostage to the M1-specific plethora of bugs and issues.

Mylenium