Recommended Workstations for Adobe After Effects

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I’m thinking of moving from Mac to PC. Can you help?

Absolutely! Over the years we have helped quite a few of our customer make the move from Mac to PC. In fact, it is a large enough number that we have a dedicated Moving from Mac to PC? FAQ page to answer some of the more common questions we receive.

How much faster will a new workstation be for After Effects?

If you want to know exactly how much faster one of our After Effects workstations would be over your currently system, we recommend downloading our Puget Systems After Effects Benchmark. This benchmark is what we use in all our internal testing which means the score you get can be directly compared against those in our Hardware Recommendation section or in our various hardware analysis articles.

Do any Puget Systems workstations support Thunderbolt?

Yes! Our After Effects Standard Workstation natively supports Thunderbolt 4, which is currently the latest and fastest version of Thunderbolt. Not all of our other computers do, though, so if that is important to you make sure that you work with one of our consultants.

Do Puget Systems computers support 10-bit HDMI or SDI displays?

Unlike Premiere Pro, there is only one way to get 10-bit display support in After Effects which is to use a video monitoring card. In our systems, we offer the Blackmagic Decklink Mini Monitor 4K and the Studio 4K 6G-SDI PCI-E cards. These video monitoring cards are specifically designed to deliver unaltered video signals to your display, resulting in the best possible video and color quality. Note that you will need a dedicated, highly accurate display that is capable of handling the FPS and resolution of your project in order to take full advantage of these cards.

Will Puget Systems PCs work for 360 degree or VR video?

Yes! After Effects does not yet have full native support for 360 degree workflows, but we have a number of customers using our workstations to do create and edit VR and 360 video content.

I’m not sure what system hardware I should use for After Effects. Help!

Depending on how much you want to dig into hardware and system specs, we have a couple different ways to help. First, we have a Hardware Recommendations page specifically for After Effects that goes over all the different major hardware components and why you would use one part over another. Alternatively, you can always contact one of our consultants and we can help you configure a system that is perfectly tailored for your workflow.
Phone: (425) 458-0273
Email: [email protected]