Typical newbie story and a question

Here’s a story for everyone’s amusement followed by a heart-felt question/plea.  Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

I’m a fairly new user on Premiere (about 11 months) and an even newer one on After Effects. 

Good news:  Learning curve on Premiere has been quick.  I had a good mentor and have a solid grasp of basic editing, titling, effects and effect controls, keyframing, etc.  The toughest thing was intelligent management and organization of source media before starting a project and getting “ahead of oneself.”

Bad news:  Here at the retirement community TV station where I volunteer (think of the old days of ‘public access’ TV) we only have CS6 (and the relevant generation of hardware).  We ARE getting a second editing station with the newest Premier Pro version, but it is not yet installed.

Even worse news:  Our upgraded subscription license for Premiere did NOT include an upgrade to After Effects with Cinema 4D Lite.  I can’t explain these decisions other than to say that when you’re the only person on site even remotely close to a graphic designer (much less a special effects editor) it’s really tough to sell a “vision” to the severely visually impaired.  It’s even tougher when you’re COMPLETELY self-taught on After Effects and barely know the first thing about the program.  Nonetheless, I have finally taken an existing 2D logo from Illustrator, converted it to extruded 3D, colorized and applied camera, lights and shading along with 720 degrees of rotation of gradually decelerating speed over a10 second duration.  Not too shabby for a rookie.

It will come as no shock to most of you that it was at this point when I encountered an entire host of rendering issues I never knew existed or had run into in rendering Premier CS6 projects.  Old generation of software on old under powered equipment operated by the well-intentioned but functionally ignorant.  I feel like an ambitious EMT who has suddenly developed an interest in what feels like the broadcast version of brain surgery – electronically generated special effects, most particularly 3D and advanced animations.  (But thankfully, no VR or gaming – just TV broadcasting and maybe independent film).

The heartfelt question/plea is, since I am not too far down this road, where do I go from here?  I am even questioning whether I should hitch my star to After Effects at all.  There are a few givens that may help some of you direct me.

1. I’m on a Windows platform.  That will not change.
2. Assume zero financial support from the station, either for training and education or upgrading software or hardware for anything outside Adobe Premiere.
3. Finished rendered files (from whatever special effects program) must be importable as source media into Premiere.  That’s where we do our final editing.  That will not change.
4. Personally, I’m in the market for a new desktop system.  I’m not even on Windows 10, and the home version of 7 is getting kind of slow, even for nothing more than mail and websurfing. But a multi-core, dual drive (one SSD) set up with a minimum of 16MB RAM and an accelerated graphics card is a financially ambitious jump for a system that will barely justify any of those enhancements less than 1/10^th of one percent of the time.  The rest of the time, it’s mail, websites and MS-Word.
5. Will new hardware and software upgrades even “solve” my problem? I want to learn this discipline, but my use of the finished product is for gratis distribution to a non-revenue producing broadcast operation with highly limited viewership.  We’re little more than hobbyists.  And next week, I’ll turn 69 years old.  There is nothing about this that is securing my future.

But, gosh, it’s fun and stimulating to turn out “professional” work even if no profession is actually involved.  Thus, it feels like a worthy emotional investment, but the financial cost is highly questionable.  So if you were me and wanted to keep doing this on the days you weren’t playing golf or pickleball, what would you do?

Thanks in advance.

LK