Now there is no 'one' best computer for anything there is; what you need it for and
what you can afford but if you're using after effects for animating, designing or editing,
in this video i'm going to break down the four components that you should invest in
and also what's exactly in my machine now first you don't need a top of the line machine to make
amazing work amazing work from 10 years ago was done on at least 10 year old hardware
amazing work from a hundred years ago was done on pen and paper and many believe some ancient cave
paintings were designed to animate and flicker in the fire light a literal sandstone wall was at one
point the cutting edge hardware for animation you can make great work on not so great systems
it might just take a little longer now i needed to upgrade because i was starting to film my videos
in this glorious 4k resolution and i was also doing a lot more dynamic linking between premiere
and after effects and often having another version of after effects open at the same
time so i could directly scree record that and place that into the edit and my old computer just
couldn't handle it now even if i wasn't admittedly taking the piss by trying to do all of that at
once my computer would just slow down to the point that i was spending more time of my day
swearing than actually working and i had built that pc myself i picked out all the
parts and put it together and that was very rewarding but it was also weeks and weeks and
weeks of research figuring out which components i needed which ones were compatible and not
knowing whether if i put them all together and switch it on it didn't work what was i
gonna do so i didn't want that experience again this time i called the professionals
uh so my name is john tanyas i'm the creative director of smoosh creative
and the technical director of smoosh workstations john started his own animation and vfx studio
and now a company that builds custom workstations for professionals building machines for some of
the best in australia and new zealand we've rolled out a bunch of systems for buck studio in sydney
but jess herrera paul malinsky nick hamilton in melbourne jenny jiang who's also an octane artist
and now they've built one for me so no one else was better qualified to help me explain i asked
john for a typical motion designer who's using after effects animating designing editing using
the adobe suite constantly which components are going to be the most useful things to invest in
in their machines to the animators i would always recommend a decent cpu with around
eight cores any modern eight core cpu these days come with really high clock speeds so
when we're talking about working in the after effects timeline or working in illustrator or
photoshop generally uses one core but you want that one call to be quite fast generally speaking
the more cores the system has the slower each core is where you'll be burning your money for
2d design and animation is probably getting a 32 core or 64 core threadripper system you've
got all these calls that aren't really going to be doing anything in after effects to be honest
for a 2d animator i would always recommend the absolute minimum 16 gigabyte of ram but for a
professional it would have to be somewhere between 32 and maybe 64 depending on how complex your
scenes are someone's doing just basic 2d animation i feel like 32 gigabytes of ram will be enough for
a professional or a mid-level someone is doing heavy compositing or heavy after effects motion
graphics will probably want 64. and these are for professionals who use these systems day-to-day
and then ssds so you would want a fast ssd drive and you know they're quite affordable
now ssd drives are becoming bigger larger and cheaper and they're extremely fast so
it's important to have a proper ssd drive which you're running your windows operating system off
and you're running your projects off as well um you're on a fast drive so things can load up quite
fast what you want to do is create a second have a completely second drive which is going to be for
your project files and system cache for after effects sorry after effects cache you want to
separate operating system and project files always now this is because if your c drive is doing all
its back-end stuff to run the operating system whilst also you're using it to read and write
resolution video footage and textures and anything really into your projects you could run into a
bottleneck where a hard drive might just not be fast enough to read and write all of those things
at once and also if your c drive gets corrupted or fails for some reason you don't want to lose
all of your project files at the same time this way you can take out the c drive buy a new one
reinstall the operating system and you're good to go without having to try to resurrect or
recover your files for a 2d designer you probably don't want anything more than an rtx 3060 or a
3070 which is considered a mid-range card after effects and photoshop and all that kind of stuff
doesn't really utilize anything beyond an rtx 3070 as much there are instances where having a
better graphics card will make things a little bit faster and snappier but once again it depends on
what plug-ins you're using how complex your scenes are and setups are but for a designer and animator
just any mid-range graphics card will do fine i guess if you just if your budget is running a
little bit low you could get something like a 3050 or a gtx 1660 which has a little bit less vram and
a little bit less raw performance but it's good enough for design and all that kind of stuff when
it comes to a 3d artist who is starting to use things like redshift or octane that's where you'd
want to invest a lot of money or as much as you can in a gpu because when it comes to render times
or just rendering feedback as you're changing your lighting and materials the faster your card the
better your cards the faster the responsiveness and the render times are going to be and and with
three designers sorry and using octane and redshift the more cards you have you could
potentially speed up your rendering as well so you can start off with one card and render you know a
scene in one minute and then in octane if you were to put it the second of the exact same card in you
could potentially like slash your renders in half just by having second of the same card and this
is where gpu rendering is really really good and flexible and extremely powerful compared to you
know rendering using cpu only in in cinema 4d you know the physical renderer or standard renderer
which is extremely slow and that brings it down to like the nuts and bolts you know a designer would
want a balance between calls and call speed a decent amount of ram and fast memory gpu generally
helps crunch some of those bigger files or formats or just working faster in the timeline but that
would be my recommendation for for a 2d animator now when i first spoke to john we first talked
about the work that i do and what i needed my machine for and then they sent me a quote with the
parts they think would work best and would suit me and once we agreed on that they built it and they
sent me this machine which was secured like it had the crown jewels inside and smoosh did a fantastic
job with this build i plugged it in it worked i've had no issues that's great for me i tried to film
some cool shots of it before i mounted it under my desk but you know what it's a black box you know
what it looks like here is the good stuff here is everything inside so you can see everything
that i'm working with and full disclosure they did give me a bit of a discount so i maybe pushed the
envelope a little bit on what i would normally get in a machine mainly with the hard drives because
who can deny the satisfaction of emptying a dedicated cash drive inside after effects
i also did notice that my cpu is the amd ryzen 9 5950x16 core which according to their website
is one processor that can game as well as it creates well the same could be said about me
so i have had it for a few months now and it has been great seeing all of the big numbers and the
fancy names for the components it does make me feel good and make me think that this is
a lot more powerful than the machine that i had last time but it's really once you get stuck in
and actually working do you feel the difference and this thing cuts through renders like butter
now my youtube videos typically used to take 15 to 20 minutes to render each one
now they're taking less than two and i can now stack an unnecessary amount of layers
and effects in after effects projects and is there any better joy than that
now i really have to thank john and everybody over at smoosh workstations first of all for building
me this machine with such care and such precision but also helping me with this video so please
check out their website follow them on socials and if you're interested in the new machine
hit them up and if you want to find out a bit more about my workstation here what i'm using
to mount the pc underneath what monitors what everything else i'm using at this test
besides the computer i've got a full video breaking that down i'll see you over there
hello john good day john let's do a couple more of those