MacBook Air After Effects Benchmark
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
Can we use the MB Air as a Pro machine for After Effects work & Rendering?
I used a project that uses only computational power, without any source footage, so hard drive performance doesn’t influence the test results. It’s a heavy combination of 3D Layers with AE Lights, Shadows & Camera (yeah, i know, it’s strength 
) created with Trapcode Echospace and…. ahm… some… Shine 
The Benchmark results:
All testes were carried out with Multiprocessing on and off.
Performance seems to be proportional to the weight of the machine. Not so the price.
- MacPro 8c 2.8 vs. Air 1.6: 8x Performance / 14x Heavier. Price ratio: 1.5x
- MBP Pro 2.4 vs. Air 1.6: 2.2x Performance / 1.8x Heavier. MBP 15″ is only 200$ pricier.
Conclusion: You can’t fit the horse inside the envelope. use it … If you manage to work on the small resolution screen, you can do some lightweight work… it’s comparable to using AE 7 on Intel Macs. (Remember Rosetta emulation?) The “Air” offeres decent speed in Aperture 2 and, if it had a somewhat bigger screen it might also be suited for the light PhotoShop tasks.
It’d be so nice to have a small and powerful machine and not have to carry around the 17″ MBP with external hard drives and everything. A roll-out screen would also be nice.
Btw., here’s the test render:
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