Known Participant

Question

What is the best computer to use for After Effects?

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
February 9, 2016
6 replies
49585 views

Hi,

I bought the latest greatest 10K apple "trashcan" computer and got to say i'm not to happy with the performance with AE. Talking to some of my peers it seems like the 12core is not as good for AE as the chips are slower. A lot of them are switching back to PCs. I like and used to MAC my self and don't really want to switch to PC but i will if i have to. The question i have is what would be the best setup for running After Effects if not concerned with the budget. I'm willing to pay more $$ to get more responsive performance. Like running a 3-4 monitors along with a preview monitor. Using particular and other third part plugins and working with 4k and 6k?

all help is appreciated. Thanks!

This topic has been closed for replies.

binbin199

Participant

So..should I invest in a Processor or a GPU?

P.M.B

Legend

It depends on what GPU and CPU you currently have. Also on what sort of work you do, plugins you use, etc. There is no one size fits all answer to your question

~Gutterfish

shiznit1994

Inspiring

In that case for the "BEST" you will need to build your PC around this Graphics Card NVIDIA's Quadro M6000 IT is the cream of the crop for After effects! My dream machine starts with this card!! There are several PC part pickers sites where you can start with that card and it will show you what parts go with it.

Adobe After Effects CC - 3D Graphics Workflow|NVIDIA

Also, Why Is this being monitored? There is nothing hateful here!

Szalam

Community Expert

shiznit1994 wrote:

In that case for the "BEST" you will need to build your PC around this Graphics Card NVIDIA's Quadro M6000

Considering how little AE uses the GPU, why you would build a computer for AE around a specific GPU? For the most part, the only thing in AE that really uses the GPU is the ray-traced renderer, but AE's ray-traced renderer is considered obsolete and is not seeing further development. If one plans to use plugins that use the GPU like Element 3d, 3d Invigorator, ShapeShifter (and I highly recommend getting at least one of them) or even Red Giant Universe, you should get a decent GPU, but you are overpaying if you get a Quadro. With Element, for example, you get much more bang for your buck with a GTX 970 than any Quadro.

shiznit1994 wrote:

Also, Why Is this being monitored? There is nothing hateful here!

The spam filter on the Adobe forums is a bit overzealous, especially for newer users. It's not a person moving your posts to moderation; it's a computer algorithm. Its over-eagerness to moderate posts is annoying, but it's a significant improvement over the floods of spam we had for a couple of months there.

Szalam

Community Expert

Sorry.. "Other" Should have said "Every sexy plugin your going to want to use!" LOL :-P I wish I had more money for plugins... Of topic, is there a recourse for learning how to build your own plugins? All I can find is "Learn (place CODE here)..

For AE? After Effects Developer Center | Adobe Developer Connection

Forum: After Effects SDK

shiznit1994

Inspiring

This is not about a system war, he is unhappy with his mac.. and he should be since he is over paying for PC components anyways, i5 or i7 processor, NVidia graphics cards, ram... The motherboards and case are the only things that are not PC parts..

You can spend $1500 on a mac that you can't fix yourself (On campus I watch 15+ IMac's crash within 2 weeks of each other) and can't upgrade yourself... OR you can get a AWESOME PC for $1500 (if you know how to build one yourself (Honestly not that hard) that you can upgrade as you need.

He asked what other options are out there. This is a fair cost comparison, I have worded on both. I love the OS on the MAC, BUT when I am doing high demand documents especially when using after effects a PC out performs dollar for dollar hands down.

A

AMAXAuthor

Known Participant

shiznit1994 hit the nail on the head. I don’t particularly care for MAC or PC. I like Mac because i’ve been using it for over 12 years, but i have build my own PCs before in the past. And i know you can’t really build ur own MAC as well.. unless u build a “hackintosh”. To summarize the question i had, I just wanted to know if people knew what options perform better then others with AE. I have heard that there are some platforms that are PC based that are really good with AE because of their chips (that macs don’t have). Have anyone heard of anything like that? I’m not talking about a computer you can buy at BestBuy. Or maybe if I would build a system from scratch, what components would work best with AE. What chip? What clock speed? what graphic hard? any motherboards people would recommend over the others?

The point is, i want to try to get or build the ultimate AE machine!

BartonGarrett256

Inspiring

‌The premiere forum has a page on building or having built editing machines, it's not too different. I've built my last three computers, it's easy to do. You should have the skill set to do so, it's not that far removed from properly configuring and troubleshooting your computer.

You can get an awful lot more computer in a PC for the same cash outlay. Apples sure is pretty, but who cares.

Thank gaming, that market is driving the hardware. We get hand me downs. I suspect there are more teenage boys with high end gaming computers in suburban Dallas than Ae users on the whole planet.

B

bogiesan

Participating Frequently

My trashcan works quite well for my AE needs. Without knowing more about your specific needs, my expectations might be far lower than yours.

l've been using AE since it was CoSA and I've got a set of editing habits and interface settings left over from those bygone days. I work at draft rez for hours or days until I'm ready to do some tests. I render dozens of tests at medium rez. Then I render only specific sections at full rez for critical evaluation. Then we do full length medium rez studies before moving on to full rez output of entire movies.

The other thing I've figured out over the decades is that I my animation is always perfect. This leads me to many hundreds of hours waiting for full rez rendering only to discover the run was a complete waste of time. I have come to know, deep in my heart, that every keyframe and every Bezier handle is very likely a terrible mistake. Humbling.

shiznit1994

Inspiring

Step one, throw that over priced hunk of junk in the trash... For what you spent on that Apple you could have built yourself a rather nice PC with upgrade ability.. where is a like to a really nice video on what you should do. I have a similar build and it works amazing!!

http://www.surfacedstudio.com/blog/best-computer-for-after-effects

I hope this helps.

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

Properly configured any machine should work well with AE. My personal choice and the choice of more than 57% of the users surveyed by Motionographer were using a Mac, only 29% are on Windows only machines. I'm using both. Let's not start a system war. Let's solve the problem.

The current version of AE (2015 x13.07.124) is not where it should be performance or UI wise but CC 2014 is working plenty fine for most folks. As long as you have your machine properly configured and you're using standard types of footage you should be able to get things to work just fine. As Adobe works through the entirely new rendering engine and UI interface performance will go up. Any good machine with components that will last will cost you money. Mac's hold their resale value much better than PC's and way way better than homebuilts. Nobody comes close to Apple's customer service. Ask Dell or HP to replace the power supply and controller on a 4 year old laptop that is out of warranty and see how fast they offer to do it for under $200 ($135 to be exact). No matter what workstation you choose you should refer to the system requirements, analyze your standard workflow and plan for the future. I usually hold on to my machines for three years, sell them and upgrade to the latest and greatest that most closely fits my projected production workflow. Pick the OS that you prefer and the best hardware you can afford, take care of it, and do good work.

Szalam

Community Expert

The After Effects team is working on redoing the core code of After Effects so that it can be a more modern, multithreaded app. So, I wouldn't toss away your new Apple just yet.

There are some things you can do to make AE work better for you. What specific things aren't working for you?

There's a bug with AE on El Capitan that makes it so cached previews don't play back real time. There is a workaround for this and the fix is targeted to come in the next update. Info in Todd's post here.

If you would like to render with multiprocessing, you can do that with After Effects CC 2014. The AE team has recommended working in CC 2015 to take advantage of the snappier user interface, improved expression handling, etc. and then to render in CC 2014. AE CC 2014 can open projects created in AE CC 2015 with no problem.

Also, make sure you're updated to 13.7 if you're trying to use CC 2015 - many issues have been fixed since version 13.5 introduced parts of the new code architecture.

That being said, you might consider getting an older Mac Pro running Mavericks with a high clock speed on the processor. (Or a Windows machine with a high clock speed. Windows 7 is pretty solid with CC 2015.)

A

AMAXAuthor

Known Participant

See, it’s not that’s i’m totally disappointed in the workflow with AE and new Mac Pro. It’s just not as good of an upgrade as I thought it would have been. I upgraded from an old Mac Pro tower that was maxed out on the Ram, SSD drives and had a NVIDIA Quadro 4000 card with CUDA. So the upgrade made it a little easier to work on some projects but not that dramatic of a difference if compared with a price tag. My biggest issue with new Macs is that i cannot connect more them 2 screens to it. And it’s not only my Macs issue. Most of my peers are experiencing the same problem. Then that there is no way (that i know of) to upgrade to CUDA video card. I know about the issue with the CC2015 and El Capitan… i actually started that thread that you are referring too. I understand that’s gonna be fixed at some point. My overall issue is that with all the tech available i want to see what pros think the best option for AE heavy workflow is. Not operating system as much as the hardware. Maybe building costume PC would be better. Combining best (for AE) Video card, CPU, ram together in one package…. or maybe there is something that is out there that is available as a package that would work great with after effects in particular.

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