Render times

Render time depends on, in this order, Frame size, frame rate, source files, effects all mitigated by available system resources, memory, GPU and CPU speed, and read-write speed on your drives. 

I do a lot of visual effects compositing and many of my projects take up to several seconds a frame to render. Some take more than a couple of minutes. When a comp takes longer than five or six minutes a frame to render I redesign the comp. There are lots of tricks you can use, and there are background rendering options that can speed things up. It is also interesting to know that for a lot of its history Pixar would design its frames to take up to seven minutes a frame to render. When the render took longer than seven minutes a frame to render, they redesigned.

It is also important to realize that After Effects is not a video editing app. It is designed to create composites, animations, and motion graphics that cannot be created in an NLE so if you are putting together half a dozen shots in a two-minute comp and any of those shots could have been processed in an NLE like Premiere Pro, you are using the wrong tool for the job. More than 90% of my comps are under seven seconds because the average time between cuts in most modern videos is somewhere around 4 to 5 seconds and almost all my comps are only one shot. 

Give us a description of your workflow, the type of source footage you are using, the frame size and frame rate, and your system details and we can probably give you an idea of what kind of render times to expect. My simplest comps, even if they are 4K, render at the rate of several frames per second, but my most complex ones can easily take several minutes a frame.