Pre Rendering in After Effects, great for AE playback, but is it essential for PPro performance?

My general rule: If a 50% magnification ratio Auto comp panel resolution preview will not render at about 4 or 5 frames per second when checked in the Info Panel I add the comp to the Render Cue - enable Render Garden*, and render a visually lossless production master to be used in Premiere Pro. If the comp will render faster than 4 or 5 frames per second I use Dynamic Link. About 80% of my work in After Effects involves some kind of visual effects, my average comp is under 7 seconds and one shot, my average VFX shot has somewhere between 8 to 10 layers and more than 90% of my AE work is rendered. I only use Dynamic Link on the simplest of comps. If I have a comp that is going to take longer than about a minute a frame to render I always render an image sequence instead of a Movie because you can fix a single frame in an image sequence if needed or just change 10. If a comp takes longer than 3 or 4 minutes a frame to render I re-design the comp.

A rule like that will cover you in almost all situations.

* I highly recommend a background rendering system. I have 4. Render Garden is my favorite because it works the best with my system, gives me an option to render an MP4 to send to the client at the same time, and there is no noticeable slowdown in AE or Premiere Pro while I am rendering so I do not lose any production time waiting for renders. If you do a lot of work in AE and you charge for your time, most BG rendering solutions will pay for themselves the first time you use them on a project that is longer than about 10 minutes.

entirely depends. There's no clear yes or no answer here. Too many factors at play like the overall complexity of a comp or project, effects used and so on. sure, DL has a lot of overhead and generally slows down things to a certain degree, but it's not all doom and gloom. In my opinion people simply expect too much of it and then hit performance bottlenecks. It was never meant to render complex AE projects dynamically, just a complementary way to get relatively simple titles and backgrounds, which I guess is ultimately the point. Many of the issues simply come down to people not working smartly and on the other end Adobe having this way overhyped and misadvertised.

Mylenium