We recently completed a project for bluekiwi software.
BlueKiwi – Brand Animation from Urge Productions on Vimeo.
To keep the project on time, you can’t wait around for rendering. So with a dual core XEON Apple Mac, you have to ask “was it worth the extra cost for those 16 processors?”
Real world examples are always welcome to most folks in the design industry. Who has time to read benchmarks and tech specs?
The wonderful thing is that all processors were fully utilized during the render of this animation by After Effects CS4. It was run on a machine with 12GB of memory and a Dual Quad Core Nehalm Xeon processor. What would have taken 17 hours or more on a mac laptop (yes, this is a real value) was readily handled in about 1 hour. The target was a 720P HD quicktime rendered to uncompressed video, then transcoded to H.264 for delivery to our client.
For the geeky folks out there, here is a screen shot of all the memory and CPUs at full utilization.
Rendering still requires a small break, but we all need breaks (but not 17 hours of a break).
Resources in use on 8-core xeon Mac, click for full screen
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