Looking to get a new Computer for animating --- suggestions?

[shurewood]

I don't know how much filespace and RAM its going to take to process these animations but if its anything similar to video files or large graphic files, I know I'm probably going to need something that can take that kind of exercise.
I'm open to some suggestions on machines anyone has used with good results.
Chhhhhhhhhheers

[Elliotanimated]

Get a Mac or a PC....

[orbital]

As Elliotanimated said Mac or PC.

I come from more of a Mac world so I will give you an idea on the Mac end of things. That said you can find PCs with similar hardware (different OS for a bit more on the low end machines and a bit more on the high)

DESKTOP
This is my configuration, I am working on a 4:30 film right now and this works fine for me.
Mac Pro (2x Quad Core 2.8 Ghz) The nice thing about macs is that you can get an 8 core machine and use all 8 cores.
16GB of Ram ($680)
3.5 TB hard drive
512 mB video card
24" LCD and 21" Wacom Cintiq.

First off RAM, get as much as you can, especially if you are using After Effects. Also if you have a Quad or OCto core system get more than 4 GB of RAM, you can then get Nucleo which will help when you composite.

3.5 TB, a 1TB eSATA drive costs about $110 now. Backup backup backup. I have 3 systems, on that is hourly, a daily, one that I back up to keep on me at all times and another that I upload my RAW animation files to a server. Your work is more valuable than the system. ALways make sure you can reconstitute your film.

eSATA RAID $400. I have a 2 drive 1 TB eSATA RAID, Allows me to edit in 1080p HD nearly uncompressed.

512MB ($150) video card, its good to have a good video card. Especially for After Effects and Maya.

If you plan to work in HD get a monitor that can display HD pixel for pixel. If you do 2d animation a Cintiq ($2000) is worth the investment.

Hope this helps.

[HellboyOne]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu5_33uRNzc[/youtube]

[FlipMcgee]

If you just want to do this for a hobby, say just have something posted on youtube. And for personal learning:

You can get by with a minimum of a 2 gigs of ram. Filespace? Depends on how big your projects files you expect to keep, how you will do your backups (dvds?, external drives?, online backup?), physical hard drive space required by your softwares, etc.

If you're just going to do this for giggles for now you can get by with 30-50 gigs of free hd space on your animating laptop or desktop. And just archive files as needed on dvds. The .flv files that youtube accepts is very low file-size wise so if you expect to do something like 3-5 seconds of animation every 4-6 months you can just get a relatively inexpensive pre-made computer (undera grand and including a monitor) for your animation use. Important thing you should make sure of besides ram is that the graphics card works well with whatever app you'll use for animation - especially if you do 3d.

You can even get a system first and try out demos of your animation apps (flash, 3d apps, etc) and see if they run okay on your specs before buying them. This way you have a better clue whether to add more ram and anticipate data storage requirements.

If you know what you're doing, money is not a problem and you must output everything in high def, sure go for terabyte drives, multi-cores, 64-bit os/tools, and as much ram as you can stuff your machine.

Good luck.

[orbital]

LoL what FlipMcgee said