From Mac to PC
I am officially a PC user after 16 years of working on Mac. I had been on the fence about upgrading my system to handle the bandwidth for image generation. Was Ai a trend or a blip like an NFT? I needed to investigate, so I decided to reach out to old friend I have not seen in 9 years.
We went to college together and worked on our first film together. Like a lot of my friends who I went to college with, most headed out to LA, including him, where the work in visual effects and motion graphics was a more logical career move. In 2018, he told me to learn Nuke and fly out to LA to work on a Michael Bay film. I didn’t go. After working on a film rotoscoping frame by frame masks for 30 hours a week, I decided to stay in Minnesota and shift my career to video and photography production.
Over coffee we discussed kids, marriage, careers but most of our discussion centered around industry trends. He spoke of his experience working in the motion picture industry, the software the large production houses were leveraging in comparison to smaller local production companies and in-house production companies. We found very similar shifts in the landscape, and similarities in how the tools were being leverage.
I was reminded of something that I had lost along the way, that these tools that we leverage to execute the work, is just that – a tool. A solution to a problem we are trying to solve. Usually, the problem is time and money, so we are paid to leverage our expertise with the set of tools we possess. It’s about knowing what tool to leverage to get the job done.
I walked away from the conversation feeling confident that the trend in Ai is here to stay, and larger production companies to smaller production companies to in-house companies are leveraging the technology whether they want to publicly admit it or not. There is still a lot of fear-based propaganda around the technology combined with uninformed public opinion which can create backlash for early adopters who are trying to push the technology.
After a two-hour conversation, I headed over to Micro Center and purchased myself a PC system that could handle the minimum requirements needed to run ComfyUI.
Minimum 8GB of VRam, RXT 360 or higher
CPU Intel Xeon E5, I5, Ryzen 5 or higher
Ram 16GB or more
Windows operating system
