MacBook Pro M3 Max optimised for After Effects

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Level 1

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MacBook Pro M3 Max optimised for After Effects

Would it for a heavy proffessional Adobe After Effects user with large, complex projects be better to get the Macbook Pro M3 Max:

A: 14 core CPU, 30-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 96GB RAM, 1TB (€ 5.129,00)

or

B: 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 64GB RAM, 1TB (€ 5.129,00)

My budget is ~5K for the machine, which is a lot, but I need it for work. I know After Effects uses a lot of RAM, but I've heard you can also assign an external SSD disk for your Disk Cache, does that help the RAM issue or not at all? And I also found that CPU speed is more important than the amount of cores. Anyways, I'm too much of a hardware noob, does anyone have well-thought-out recommendation?

MacBook Pro (M3, 2023)

Posted on Nov 24, 2023 9:30 AM

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Answer 1

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Rieszkeee Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 20, 2023 6:41 AM in response to Mirkohk

I ended up talking a lot with somebody from Adobe who really understood After Effects technically. The conclusion is pretty simple:

If you do 80%+ After Effects as a professional, go for the extra RAM. I went for this option, because I do full projects and long videos fully animated in After Effects, real big After Effects projects. And don't worry, this option still runs Illustrator, Photoshop, C4D, Chrome, Figma, Spotify and more all at the same time. After Effects and everything else is running INTENSELY fast, pretty much no render times at all... :/ It's really stunning. Probably overkill, but that's exactly what I want, as a power user.

If you do a little bit of everything, let's say your workflow is more divided in a balanced way, so 25% photoshop/illustrator, 25% C4D, 25% After Effects, 25% other stuff, or something like that, then you might as well go for the option with more cores. Multitasking will then perform slightly better, but just really, really slightly.

Anyway, I was completely overthinking it, but you can't go wrong with either of these setups. They are both blazingly fast. First I was thinking about an external SSD for the AE cache, which helps, but with these setups you don't really need that.

Hope this helps!

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Answer 2

Nov 25, 2023 11:53 AM in response to Rieszkeee

Here are the minimum and recommended system requirements:

There is no substitution for RAM other than swap file usage, so buy all you can afford. If that exceeds your budget then you have to rethink either budget or planned work load.

I'd go with option B.

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