After Effects CS4 on iMac?

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Permalink Reply by Eric Nelson on December 4, 2008 at 8:19pm

Well i have an iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS. i have no problem running FCP and Motion, have not tried After Effects but i would think i would be OK, maybe just a little slow.

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Permalink Reply by QueenGeek on December 4, 2008 at 9:52pm

I had CS3 on a first gen Intel iMac, 17" with standard 2 GB of RAM. It ran but definitely could have used more memory. Since the iMac's max at 4GB that seems like it is more of an issue rather than will it run on an iMac.

I actually ordered the trial DVD for $10 (CS3) to test before spending any money...not sure if they offer that for CS4 but it maybe worth a shot to test the entire suite & get a feel for performance if you have access to an iMac.

Check out this thread: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1017&message=2...

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Permalink Reply by markaplet on December 4, 2008 at 10:54pm

I have After Effects CS4 already. The company I work for already made that purchase. However We could not install it on our PowerPC systems as the minimum system requirements are multicore Intel processors. It also says you have to have Open GL 2.0 I tried to figure out if the iMac supported this or if you had to have a dedicated video card or not. 2GB is also the minimum RAM required. I can add 2 more GB of RAM to the system but is that enough? I have 16 GB in my MacPro at home where I currently have CS4 installed. Even with the 16 GB RAM and a 512 MB video card it's still taxing on the system. I could only imagine how it would run on an imac. I can deal with the performance hit thats not really my problem. I am just not sure if it's even possible to install CS4 on the iMac. I would hate to have them buy me an iMac only to discover it will not work. They would be really mad at me for that. :) So I was hoping to hear from someone here that yes you can in fact install it on a new iMac and if the performance is acceptable for light duty motion graphics.

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Permalink Reply by subby on December 5, 2008 at 1:35am

Hi our company runs cs4 but all on pc based machines but the one thing i will say is cs4 uses lots of resorces compared to cs3 so be warned have the biggest machine you get your hands on or you will have trouble keeping it stable

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Permalink Reply by Farrell Kramer on December 6, 2008 at 9:32am

I had some difficulty with Photoshop CS4 Extended in my iMac (not one of the newer, silver ones) and after some investigation with Adobe found out that it relies heavily on the graphics card, moreso than earlier versions. I'm guessing this is true, too, for the rest of the CS4 creative suite.

Thus, I'd make sure to check the graphics card that comes with your iMac out with the program. They cannot be swapped, whereas the MacPro does allow for this.

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