I was hoping for a performance increase from my iMac, but I didn’t realize it would be this drastic. I’ve never been able to get a new machine that cuts my render times by 3X, without spending over $10k. This is the first time I’ve been blown away by render speeds-at least in a very long time. Here’s my first baseline test with my iMac, with the same sequence in both 20. One thing I didn’t realize though was how fast After Effects 2022 would render projects compared to After Effects 2021, thanks to the new multi-frame rendering, which had been missing since around 2014. I wanted to get a good baseline test render using my iMac. Now with everything installed, it was time to start testing. And as soon as I finished installing it, I saw that Adobe had also announced a new public beta which is M1-native. And to my surprise, all apps are now M1-native-except for After Effects, which would run under Rosetta 2. The new M1 Pro and M1 Max arrivals also coincided with Adobe’s Max event, with new 2022 versions of all of their apps. Would this be a different story than the last time I got a laptop to perform as a desktop? Fast forward to launch day and my local Apple Store had all of the configurations in stock, so I ran over to pick up a Space Gray 16” MacBook Pro with the M1 Max, 64GB of ram and 4TB of storage. Then Apple announced the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, loads of ambitious claims and I wondered how my current projects could benefit. I had considered testing an M1 Mac Mini, but didn’t want to take on many of the tradeoffs with a first-gen chip. But it turned out the iMac was always quite a bit faster on real-world projects, even though Geekbench and other performance tests showed otherwise. At the beginning of 2020, I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the 16” i9 Model, thinking it may match or beat out my 2017 iMac. I started my freelance business with a 2015 MacBook Pro, and as I needed more and more power, I moved to a 5K iMac, which has been my main workhorse since 2017. As a motion graphics artist, I’ve been cautiously optimistic about performance increases with After Effects-an app my freelance business depends on daily.

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