Hey folks, I'm finally pulling the trigger on a new desktop, and getting a "trashcan mac" aka the new mac pro, and have a reasonable budget to build an AE-specific speed demon. Some decisions are easy (max out the ram, graphics cards, and internal HDD), but some are not so easy. The main one that has me stumped is the question of whether to sacrifice clock speed for more cores.
Currently I can choose between a 3.5ghz 6-core processor, a 3.0ghz 8-core, a 2.7ghz 12-core. This seems like a really tough call, and I'm trying to get a handle on what kinds of AE work would prefer a faster processor, and what kinds of work would prefer more cores. Put another way, which processes in AE can be done in parallel, and which have to be done in sequence?
A bit about the kind of work that i do:
I do both motion graphics and VFX. Increasingly, I make use of 4k+ footage (usually RED).
The motion graphics work makes use of many layers and high-resolution images, and sometimes involves Trapcode's Particular and Form plug-ins (which in my experience handle multiprocessing on my 6-year old Mac Pro 2,1 VERY poorly*)
The VFX work is usually compositing (using several instances of keylight among other things) and can involve many instances of high resolution footage. It frequently involves Red Giant's Key Correct suite.
I ram preview frequently, and the additional wait time when multiprocessing is turned on on my current computer sometimes problematic enough that I have to turn it off.
Plug-ins i use often:
Plexus
Particular/Form
Element 3D/Optical Flares
Keylight
Camera Lens Blur/Box Blur
Liquify
Add Grain
3D Camera Tracker
Timewarp
As a bonus question (if I haven't bored you to death yet), I'm trying to sort out the Thunderbolt 2 RAID situation. I'm looking at G-Tech, OWC, Promise, and Areca, and can't really get my head around the differences between the units (except that the G-Tech uses 6TB drives, which I like. Upgrading the drive size later is expensive.). I also haven't been able to find any good comparisons yet.
Thanks so much for your help! Any advice you can give me in helping sort through this will be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Ari
*That said, on the most memorable occasion I was creating an animated crowd by feeding Form several hundred 1000x1000px frames.... presumably buffering that much data is not really possible.