Graphics card for After Effects

Hi Ken,

I just started using After Effects CC 2014. Everytime I open the program I get a message saying that in order to run Ray-tracing
on the GPU, I need a different graphics card and CUDA 5.0 or later driver (see photo). My 27 " iMac with 3.4 Intel Core i7 is running a AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB graphics card with 20 GB. Adobe's website lists the following cards:

GeForce GTX 285
GeForce GTX 675MX
GeForce GTX 680
GeForce GTX 680MX
GeForce GT 650M
Quadro CX
Quadro FX 4800
Quadro 4000
Quadro K5000

The Adobe tech support said to ask Apple which card would be compatible for my system.
I called Apple and the tech support said that my AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB graphics card is more than sufficient.
My question is: do I need to a buy a new graphics card and download a CUDA driver?
So far, everything seems to be running OK.

AMD is made by AMD, not NVidia. I'm not sure why stupid ol' Adobe only supports Nvidia for GPU acceleration. I don't think you can change the graphics card in an iMac. In fact I think the only thing you can change is the RAM.

Just click "never again" on that prompt next time it pops up. Let the CPU do the work. It's slower than GPU acceleration but it still works.

Adobe is slowly catching up with OpenCL, but the Ray-tracing plugin in AE is old and it probably cannot be improved to support OpenCL. As Joe said: no sweat, let it work with the CPU. Certainly no need to replace your good graphics card for an nVidia one just for this. Just tell that warning to never appear again.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hi Ronny,

I've been exploring the Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 suite via the trial versions. I know you're not a big fan of Premiere Pro.
I worked with it for a month and am OK with it but except for the faster speed, I still prefer FCP 7 as an NLE. I find doing zooms and pans on shots using FCP 7's motion tab's key frames much easier to work with but I do like the eliptical mask feature in PP.
I also like the way PP integrates with Photoshop and After Effects and the audio program Audition.
In your opinion, how well does FCP X integrate with Photoshop and After Effects? Is it possible to "round-trip"?

Thanks,
Phil

Hi Phil,

I'm not a big fan of Premiere, that's correct. Not because I think it's a bad application, but because it doesn't offer anything I cannot do better in any other NLE. It does not have the enterprise strength of Avid nor does it have the speed and the organizing features of FCP X. That's why we don't use it at all.

There is no real round-tripping between FCP X and AE or Photoshop, but we also don't use either of these anymore. For the mograph and compositing tasks our video editors have to do, Motion 5 offers everything we need and it is much faster than AE because it works in realtime. For anything more complex we use Smoke, which is a high-end true 3D compositor that works seamlessly together with FCP X, just like Resolve does for grading and ProTools for audio sweetening. We have replaced Photoshop with Pixelmator, a much simpler but very powerful photo editing application that gives us everything we need without the bloated interface of Photoshop.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Well, Ronny, in my films, I don't do heavy-duty compositing or color grading. Of the latter, more like color correcting to make the scene look good. What I really need is an NLE that will replace FCP 7 and enable me to manage lots of footage, access footage from previous projects and utilize it in current projects as well as access sound effects and music from Soundtrack Pro and do scene manipulation such as pans, zooms, blowups and repos. In my current project, I am mixing DVC Pro HD 1080 24pa footage with 1920 X 1280 23.98p footage shot on a Canon 5D Mark III. So far so good. Will I be able to mix footage formats in FCP X and edit natively or do I have transcode everything to Apple ProRes 422?

Thanks,
Phil

Your system can handle 4K DSLR footage natively, but highly compressed footage will always play smoother when it's optimized to a real editing codec.

Yes you will be able to access all your sound effects from the Soundtrack Pro Library right from within FCP X and without the need for any transcoding at all. FCP X accepts any audio format, from mp3 over multichannel .caf to uncompressed AIFF and polyphonic WAV. Many effects in STP are in .caf format, you just drag them onto an FCP X timeline. Most of these effects are already included in the standard installation of FCP X anyway. Enjoy the read.

Best wishes,

Ronny