AE runs too slowly, do I need a better computer?

[Ryan5FA7]

Hello my Adobe Bros! (A-Bro-bees?),

I'm new to After Effects. I've been working on a 2D animation project using Adobe Illustrator and Character Animator. I've been following tutorials from Okay Samurai, who mostly posts about Character Animator. I'm following his tutorial (titled "Complete Cartoon Workflow") and I'm at the step where I bring everything I've created and captured in Character Animator and put it all together in After Effects. But it is nearly impossible to work in After Effects. Everything I do takes forever to render and I always get the colored spinning wheel and my computer fan goes crazy. I also have already lowered the resolution to "quarter" and have it set to skip every 2 frames, but it still struggles.

Here are the specs of my current Macbook:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) Running Catalina OS

Processor: 2.5 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5

Memory: 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

Even though I don't know what a lot of the above specs mean, I thought 16 GB of RAM would be enough to run the program. I know AE can do 3D stuff complex special effects so I assumed that my simple 2D stuff wouldn't be an issue. My computer struggled a little to process some MoCap stuff in Character Animator and the fan went crazy but the program still ran quickly with no delays.

Could someone tell me what the ideal specs are for running this program? Do I need more RAM? Is it the processor or graphics card that's the problem? What are the specs that you all use that allow the program to run smoothly. If I have to get a new computer, what would the ideal specs be? Again, I probably won't go beyond 2D animation projects. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. I've already spent months working on this project (a whole freaking quarantine) and I really want to finish it but it's impossible to work like this. Help!

[Rick Gerard]

What size is the comp and what is the frame rate? You should be running ram previews with all effects off, motion blur off, and Comp Rendering set to Fast Draft. I call that kind of preview a Pencil Test. You use the Pencil test preview to check the staging and timing, then you turn on the effects, set the Comp Panel to Final Quality, turn on Motion Blur and check a few hero frames at full resolution. You don't try and ram preview more than a couple of seconds or two at full rez with all effects. Not even Pixar does that. 

Each comp should be 1 shot. Don't try and edit a sequence in a single comp. If your comp takes more than a couple seconds a frame to render full rez previews (I call that Ink and Paint), then you should render a production master for each comp using a visually lossless format like the Render Queue's Lossless preset, then you should do your final editing in Premiere Pro. If your renders take more than a few seconds a frame I strongly suggest that you render to an image sequence so that if anything happens to the render, you have to option to pick up where it failed or just render the 4 bad frames from a 300 frame sequence that you want to fix. You can't do that if you render movies. 

One other thing. Unless you have to use a shape layer animator or actually animate a vector path your AI layers should never be converted to shape layers. You can really slow down a very powerful system if you start throwing hundreds of shape layers at a comp. 

I hope this helps. 

[Byron Cortez]

I'd start by going down to High Sierra, your system is too old for Catalina. Remember to back up your files in case you take my suggestion.