What laptop is best for animating!?! Any recommendations? I’ve been looking at Apple Mac’s but there are too many options!
I've recently completed a job animating in Adobe Photoshop and I noticed that my laptop was struggling to playback the animation. I wondered if anyone had any recommendations? I know Apple Mac's can be good for running Adobe software, but I'm unsure if there's a benefit in the Pro's?
I mostly use Adobe Photoshop and After Effcts.
Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Replies10
- @Megan Howard glad i could help! yes this is a good point, to me i find that they are better value for money despite the price but this may be because i play games on there too 🤣 i hope you find the best option for you soon!
- @Douglas Karson thanks so much Douglas, a Mac Pro 14 inch is what I’ve been looking at so it’s good to hear this! I do agree about the airdropping ease too, especially as I work a lot on my iPad so they will “talk” nicely to each other 👍
- @Daniella Gyambibi thanks so much Daniella. Super helpful, especially the specs. I have lots of university pals who use gaming laptops but I’ve found they are even more expensive than a Mac 😳
- @Jon Buckley thanks so much Jon!
- @Jenny Harrington thanks so much Jenny! I’ll have a look at emptying my cache, maybe that will help!
- I still animate on my 15-inch Macbook Pro from 2012, I just can't let go of the ports and the fixability of it. I love using it and would struggle to move to a PC.I upgraded the RAM myself to GB and it only struggles to playback animation if it's really heavy, particle systems or loads of pre-comps in pre-comps.Have you tried emptying your disk cache? That can really help if After Effects is slow to render.Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache...Always helps to empty it when it's full.
- @Douglas Karson also not, I think Apple is rubbish as an operating system but only came on board for the hardware superiority and interconnection. Airdrop is an amazing thing!
- Get a MacBook Pro 14/16 (or Mac Studio or specked out max mini depending on your needs) , best you can afford. Make sure you get Apple silicon in it (either m1 used or m2 new).Honestly the hardware in Apple puts windows to shame for rendering and exporting.I did a huge amount of research on this for my own computing needs doing 4k edits and my good is it a good machine. M1 14 inch MacBook Pro is widely regarded by reviewers as best laptop released by humans to date still.
- i use a surface book 3 with 32gb ram and a 1tb ssd! i’ve been able to export motion graphics and 3d renders pretty well on it.(here are the specs if you want to compare to your current setup: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-book-3-specs-and-features-261d4bb1-2851-d9d5-2020-283429f6cd8c)it’s no longer sold, but as jon below shared, the more ram and power you can get, the better. i believe higher end gaming laptops are usually good because they have better graphics cards and more ram than the average computer.i’ve also heard macs are good, but i also know they can be overpriced sometimes so i tend to stick to laptops that run windows 😅hope that’s helpful!
- You need as much computing power and RAM as you can afford, otherwise your renders will take a very long time. I also recommend an external SSD that you can use as a cache and even a place to render to., so having one for each of those processes is good. Animation is a time consuming endeavor, whatever you can do to speed up output will be a blessing.
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