in this video I want to talk through what hardware is important for running
after-effects what parts I put in the PC I built at the end I'm going to talk
through a piece of tech that I'm loving from this week's sponsor gigabyte I've
been using the AERO 15 OLED for weeks now and it is by far
the fastest laptop I have ever used and it has this beautiful 4k AMOLED screen but
more about that later
here's my workspace I've got two monitors a Wacom Cintiq and mechanical
keyboard and a mouse underneath I've got this and here's what's in it I research
for months to make sure I was buying components they were going to be the
most cost effective for the best performance in After Effects and that
would help my work for the most which typical for a 2d motion designer is a
lot of illustrator Photoshop but mostly after effects
for CPU you want a higher speed with fewer cores that's much better for After Effects
than let's say a lower speed with many multi multi cores
your Ram more RAM means less time RAM previewing
it wouldn't necessarily render faster but it will render more frames
so you'll spend less time buffering
sixteen gigabytes would be the minimum I'd go for with your RAM
32 is probably your safest bet and 64 if your budget allows for it
but you can always upgrade later
your GPU the graphics card graphics card doesn't need to be too intense for After Effects
as of 2019 After Effects doesn't take that much advantage of GPU rendering so it might
not be the most cost-effective thing to splash out on a really high-end graphics
card but if you're working in 3d or considering dabbling in 3d in the future
you might want to consider investing in a high-end one
a decent solid-state drive is also a must but that's gonna be pretty much a given in any new machine
ideally you'd have a separate one for your media for your operating system and
your cache as well but it's not essential I don't have separate ones for
all of those 500 gigabytes should be good one terabyte if you can really
afford it but you know they spend to get pricey
a 4k screen is also ideal as well
mainly because of how much space After Effects takes up once you add all your
panels and all your plugins you can end up with a pretty small space for your
composition window in your timeline so I like to have a lot of real estate I love
a dual monitor setup as well it's only not essential I only ever use After
Effects in one window I tried a bunch of layouts and work spaces where the
timeline separate on a couple of different monitors but it just doesn't
work for me so I stick to one monitor and have you know secondary one for my
reference and if you can I highly recommend a mouse with a horizontal
scroll wheel it makes scrubbing through timelines so
much easier for all your other components motherboard power source just
make sure they're compatible you don't need to break the bank on those the
previous machine that I use before building that PC was of mid-2012
MacBook Pro and all the studios that had worked in up until that point had all
used iMacs I had a budget of 3000 AUS dollars of the time
to build my machine the iMacs were just ridiculously overpriced for the hardware
included so I begrudgingly made the jump to PC the first few weeks were a little
tricky to get used to but it was mainly the keyboard layout and Windows Explorer
that took the longest so if you're thinking of making the jump to PC be
brave you'll be fine just stick through the first few weeks
the newest addition to my studio is this laptop that was sent to me by this video
sponsor gigabyte it is the AERO 15 OLED it is a speced up laptop that's aimed
at creatives rather than gamers and it has all of those components to get a
high performance out of After Effects and more
It'll run out defects like butter when I was buying the stuff for my PC all of
the high-end components and peripherals were all targeted towards gamers and
looked like they were all designed by a person whose only source of inspiration
was men's razors and everything had LEDs that screams every color of Mountain Dew
so it's very refreshing to have something as powerful with a much
subtler design and inside it we've got an Intel Core i7 ninth gen CPU and the
graphics card does stand out got an Nvidia rtx 2070 which makes light work
of my most heavy projects if you're using 3d applications this card is gonna
help you out a lot way more powerful than one in my big desktop machine and
we've also got a very healthy 500 gigabyte SSD 16 gigabytes of RAM but my
favorite two things are this ridiculous 4k AMOLED screen which is insane for
any screen let alone a laptop and best of all all these ports ports after ports
with ports like these you ain't ever have to take your dongle out it's also
damn light for everything packed in there just 2 kilograms I've been using
it for the past few weeks and it's speed is ridiculous I've gotten used to taking
a tea break when I needs a ram preview on a laptop but this thing handles
whatever I throw at it no problems I had to go out of my way to add unnecessary
blurs and glows and all sorts of textures to even make it break a sweat
I think it's really important for good hardware to stay out of your way as much
as possible if your designer animation has to be compromised because of render
times or playback speeds that's a real shame
the ideal hardware lets you focus on what you're creating and the AERO 15
OLED certainly does that I made a short playlist of some related videos that'll
think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video
and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week
Subtitle: Zoe J Marriott