Can MBP handle After Effects CS3?

[Luis Ortega]

I have a 2.4 SR MBP with 4 gigs ram and an external firewire 800 drive for media.
I notice that when I use AE CS3 on it, the preview renders are very slow, and the ram previews are also slow. I have tried all of the performance enhancements suggested in the help files for AE.
I get faster ram previews using my old PC with a Pentium 4 3.2ghz and 2 gig ram when using AE CS2.
Is there something that I am doing wrong, or is AE CS3 just too much for a MBP and requires a Mac Pro with multi core xeons?
At the school where I work, I have a dozen G5 1.8 Mac Pros with 2 gig ram and only one internal drive loaded with CS3 Master Collection, but I am wondering whether it's a good idea to try to run AE CS3 on such machines if my new MBP can't provide a reasonable rendering time for previews. I can't afford to have the kids sitting around all the time waiting for previews to render.
Should I be considering going to lower resolutions/quality for previews?
Thanks for any advice.

 

[jonnysods]

Just a noobish opinion from me, but I would figure some of the slowness could be due to the difference between a desktop processor and a laptop processors FSB speeds and some other factors. I use CS3 myself and I don't have too many problems in photoshop and illustrator etc though. And your machine sounds pretty stacked to me.

I always figured a Mac Pro would be tons faster though - just not as easy to sling over your shoulder to take to school or anything!

I know what you are thinking - I was no help at all.