Does my 2019 MacBook Pro Work with after affects?

[sant7]

Macbook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Two thunderbolt 3 ports)

1.4Ghz Quad Core Intel Core i5

8GB RAM

Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645 1536 MB

I'm planning on doing basic vfx work with particles and plug-ins, but I don't know if my mac is capable of running After Effects. I use Davinci Resolve for some editing and it works fine but since After Effects deals more with 3d scenes and visual effects, I'm not sure if it will run as good. Does the configuration above work?

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

Technically that Mac will run After Effects, but the experience might be OK, probably not great.

I have the 2018 16GB RAM version of that Mac laptop, and it runs well enough for my relatively simple After Effects work. 

I boosted it with a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU, but that only helps the parts of After Effects that support GPU acceleration. The rest of After Effects depends on the CPU, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro has never been a high performer in the CPU department, more like middle to low middle.

The cooling system of the two-port 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro holds it back somewhat. The four-port model (which mine is) has two cooling fans, but the two-port model has only one fan. In a program that drives the CPU as hard as After Effects does, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is likely to run its cooling fans fast and loud much of the time. The single fan in the two-port 13-inch will probably cause it to throttle down the CPU sooner and longer because it will not be able to cool as well as the two fans on the four-port model. (Cooling and throttling should be much less of a problem with Apple Silicon Macs than on these older Macs with Intel CPUs.)

The 8GB RAM will really limit After Effects, especially for previewing. The length of a real-time RAM preview depends on the amount of free RAM for caching previewed frames. Under 8GB RAM, it’s likely that you might only get a few seconds of real-time RAM high-resolution preview before it can’t find more RAM and has to drop to non-real-time rendering. You will probably have to tweak down your preview quality settings to get a longer real-time RAM preview.

DaVinci Resolve also has rather high system requirements, so if you’re more or less satisfied with how that runs on a two-port 13" MacBook Pro, you might be able to live with running After Effects on it.