Proxy layers render slower than original. Video layers in general are extremely slow.

Thanks for the reply.

"First, there is probably no reason at all to have the proxy files 60 fps."

Sure there is, to reduce the final render time of my composition.
Maybe there's a misunderstanding with the word 'proxy', I'm not using it as a temporary replacement, I'm using it to replace precomps within a big comp to relieve my system of having to rerender it during the final export. The idea is, the moment I want to render a final export, it only needs to compound several proxies, into one file. That's why I'm rendering everything at 'final' spec.

"Unless you are trying to simulate the look of game footage or need to have a 60 fps comp.
The only thing most of your audience might be gaining is a little more of a video and less than a movie experience. Only a small percentage of a general audience can tell the difference and YouTube will seerve up 30 fps video to almost all of the people viewing the completed project anyway, because that's what they do to save bandwidth."

60fps is needed in my projectspace.
Regardless the 60 fps is not an issue in the problem I'm posing. It's video performance in AE on a M1.
As I pointed out in my previous post I'm hoping this is because of the non-native version of AE on M1.

"What resolution is the original footage? What is the frame rate of the original footage?"

I'm creating my comp from scratch with video added in, so it's basically irrelevant in my perfomance question, 1920x1080 60 fps is the final output spec. The video elements are about 5000x3000, which I've already scaled down 50% with a proxy. So it wouldn't need to access those big frames during the final export. Fun fact, as it turns out, it barely impacted the performance in a positive way. Might as well not have rendered proxies...

"I am also not sure why you are rendering footage (exporting) using proxy footage. Seems like a waste of time because it can't be used in a final edit or other AE projects because neither the NLE nor AE will know that the footage is a proxy, and even if it did, there would be no original to replace it with."

That's part of the 'proxy' misunderstanding. As I've said I'm using them for final export.

"I'm using an M1 Mac also. I am working on an hour-long documentary that was all shot 4K, is mostly ProRez and Red footage, and I am having no problems at all with any of my comps and I am not rendering proxies. Some of the original work done on the film I am working on had proxy footage created by another editor for some of the 4K Red footage. It was all 720p, but I have not used any of it in the current edit because it has not been necessary."

You're probably using premiere? Sure, video works super smooth in PR.
I'm talking about AE, and not editing, but motion using video.

"If you have to stick with this workflow you might consider rolling back AE to a previous version or trying the Beta version if you have access to it. I am not having any issues at all currently with the last 3 releases of After Effects on my M1 Mac."

Well I've been considering my options.
I might have to start using premiere as the primary engine to my motion pieces. The big drawback however is that when I'm moving video elements in sync with motion, and that motion has expressions in after effects, there is no way to get those video layers to behave the same in premiere. Since I can't paste or create those kind of keyframes in PR.

I've tried the beta version, the multiprocessing is very nice but still extremely unstable and not usable for critical projects. Rolling back to a previous version of Big Sur would open up the option to scripts like 'Render Garden'. So I might give that a try, although with 16gb of ram there's only so much you can do with multiple instances..

So I either wait until Adobe releases a native M1 version which solves this problem, and hoping this won't take another 2 years for it to be released. Or I need to go back to a windows workstation/hackintosh, although I'm not looking forward to windows or having to configure a hackintosh again.