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I just bought a MacPro ( 6 core, 3.5GHz, Intel Xeon E5 with 32GB of ram ) and am in the process of testing it to see how much better it can be ( should be ). This has been a torture of a process since you can get a loaded iMac 5K with a quad i7 for less money, and according to a lot of reviews, it performs better than the MacPro. Now, I know we are not comparing apples and apples (no pun intended). I like to skip one or two generations, opting to buy the best I can when I do purchase and make it last as long as possible. The MacPro is a workstation, build for the future; I am getting to the point now... I can't do side by side tests but I ran a few renders through the new computer and my MacBookPro ( 2.3GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB ram ). I wanted to see a two to there fold acceleration ( considering the steep price difference ). The same short EI script rendered in 1:35 on the MacPro and 2:45 on the MacBookPro, faster but not so much. I can see all the cores maxing out on both machines, you can tell that Camera is multi-threaded and using all the resources. If I am right, the new mac doesn't support Open GL and is not built with Nvidia technology ( but that should not affect rendering, right? ). I also tested After Effects, but this is pathetic for the time being, quite depressing actually. We will have to wait for Adobe to re-write and take advantage of the new architecture, easier said than done. But, I digress... I always loved EI and Camera for its fast rendering, it saved my bacon a few times. I am currently rendering 9K animations and it does not even blink. But, since were are always trying to improve, I was wondering if someone at EI has looked at the MacPro specs ( the new ones ). Are there any plans to take advantage of these new computers, Macs are a small market, and it would be a lower priority, and it may be hard to implement. I am no programmer, but I do appreciate the effort and dedication involved in making all of this work well. We all want the best ( so do our clients ), Christian

Like most EI animators, I use a lot of different programs to do my work and sometimes it gets hard to remember how to do something or if the option you are looking for exist in the program you are currently using. I am running into this issue now. I built a scene with cars racing inside a stadium. I have to start with my camera at the top (bird's eye view) and finish my scene with the camera at ground level. The problem is that my end position is outside the stadium. Removing part of the stadium is easily done by using a "clip plane" in Houdini, I have done it many times. But now, this is a series and everything is done in EI. I can't find a way to clip just a section of my geometry. I would like to avoid doing it in a modeler and re-importing geometry. I thought of using a clipping map, but it involves a lot of objects. Is there a way to tell the camera not to render geometry before a determined distance, or something like tat? Thanks, Christian