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| On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Jim Lang <james.c.lang@gmail.com> wrote: > Does AE work decently on a mini? From: Teddy Gage [mailto:teddygage@gmail.com] I think it depends on your definition of "decently," and of course, the project. Could you mock up a few quick titles? Sure. Would you be able to render a 1080p project with 5 million+ particles and a mess of 3D layers and depth of field? probably not. Actually I respectfully disagree. Mac Minis come with a dual-core i5 (i5 is what's in an iMac), if you give them enough ram they'll run After Effects just fine. My home machine is an iMac that's just over 3 years old, it has 4gb ram and a Core 2 Duo in it. It runs AE v5 without any problems and I've done a lot of high end jobs with it - it's less powerful than a current mac mini and is due to be replaced but it can still do anything I want it to (just slowly). Here's a thought experiment: If you were to buy a high-end, 12-core Mac Pro and stick 24 GB ram in it, the Apple Store will happily charge you $6000 for it. For the same $6000, you could buy a 27" quad-core iMac with 16GB ram, and 4 dual-core Mac Minis with 8GB ram. If you use the change to buy Deadline network rendering software, you've got yourself a nice iMac workstation and a 4 machine render farm. With dual cores and 8 GB ram, each mac mini can have 2 instances of AE render running at the same time, so you've got 8 render engines at your disposal. Would such a setup be faster than a single 12-core Mac Pro? I don't know. But it's worth thinking about... -Chris |
