Motion 3 on a MBP (early 08) vs MBP (late 08) vs iMac

H

HunterGather

macrumors member
I'm curious of anyone who runs Motion 3 on any of these machines and how they perform (especially the ones that are maxed out/top of the line).

I don't intend, at least for now, to get into really complex work, or alot of HD stuff.
But some small projects and to get more experience.

I keep going back and forth on what I want, but I think i have settled on a refurbished mbp 2.6ghz prev. generation.

Money IS an issue, so a Mac Pro is out of the question.

My current 17 inch Intel Core Duo imac is getting a little long in the tooth.
At first I thought I could get a 3.06ghz iMac for the big stuff, and have a nice lil' white macbook for portable needs, but figured i could compromise the 2 things with a MBP (i dont think i want the new models just yet).

Guess I just wanna hear any experiences with Motion 3 on any of these 3 machines.

Thanks!
 
After the complexity of the Motion project itself, the biggest factor in speed and usability of Motion is the spec of the graphics card in the host machine. I occasionally use Motion 3 on my (early 08) MBP and for the majority of my work (SD-res, though with frequent use of emitters and motion blur) it's more than usable - depending on what I'm doing I can usually get 10-15fps frame rates without having to pre-render.

As long as your Motion projects are fairly simple, and at SD resolution, an early 08 MBP will be fine. If you can find one, I would recommend one with the better graphics card, however (I believe that the 512Mb card was a BTO option...?)

HTH
 
Motion is also Core Image based, so it does tend to perform better on ATI graphics cards. All current Apple notebooks are NVIDIA based, whereas all iMacs and stock Mac Pros are ATI.

Nonetheless, Motion runs just fine on my 2.6GHz MBP (pre-Unibody) with the 512MB NVIDIA 8600M GT.
 
Thanks people!

I think I've settled on a refurb MBP 2.6

But everytime i see a picture of the new MBP, i fall in love with it!
But i can't justify spending that much for a laptop.
 
Well, yeah, i mean, after taxes and all that good stuff, a refurb MBP is gonna almost reach 2 grand, but i meant a NEW one.

Believe me, if i had the money, I'd get a new Pro right now.
 
first gen MBP

I use Motion 3 a lot on my first gen 2.16 MBP. I have maxed the ram to 2gig and it runs pretty damn smooth on SD projects providing I don't use to many emitter layers. The graphics card is an ATI radeonX1600
 
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