[Adrian Jans]

Thank you for your advice, I’ll definately implement all of them next time around. I ended up finding a version of Leopard1, installed it and AE on an external drive, while this did in fact yield slightly better render times, (bringing things down to about 1.5 hours instead of 3) it still wasn’t enough of an improvement when I had about a dozen more to render (and booting from a portable every time would kinda suck), so instead I exported the files out of FCP at the resolution the websites will output the videos at (about 300×220), which brought my render times down to the 20 min. range. The reason I avoided doing that before, is because for whatever reason, downscaling the videos from within the website always yielded a much higher quality than using a video that was downscaled before uploading it to the site.

The RAM price I was quoting was indeed Apples RAM, which is really just the first thing to pop into my mind. Looking around it seems like the going rate for 8GB of RAM for the macbook pro I use is about $500 for quality, which still seems really high to me, but I guess the PC has a much more competitive market as far as hard ware add ons go (with the way PC gamers buy new hardware and all).
My company actually thinks it would make a bigger performance boost if I installed a SSD into my computer instead of more RAM (would also cost $500) does anyone have any thoughts on this? (or is that something I should take to a new forum/ thread/ look up old posts?)

I would like to thank everyone who participated in this thread, no matter if I get the answers I hope for or not, as a small town amateur, I am really appreciative that all of you seasoned Pros take any time out of your day to read and respond to my posts.

[Adrian Jans]

Hmm… I ran into a similar problems to this myself, only difference is I did the the keying on FCP (but still with Keylight) instead of AE, but that shouldn’t make too big of a difference.

Make sure you have screen replace set to “Source” or if that brings in too much green, “Hard Colour”
If your still having issues, something that I did once was to use the color corrector to make the blacks extra dark so it made for a more uniform key. Be careful with your balance though, and that increasing the blacks doesn’t effect other parts of your subject negatively.

Hope I could help.

[Adrian Jans]

Alright, I’ll say this more clearly, I did indeed turn multiprocessing off, all together. Which resulted in the same render times I was encountering earlier.
I have read the article Todd posted several times and have done all it has suggested short of buying more RAM (which I’m working on convincing my company to do, although $800 is a lot to drop on RAM, especially when everyone else involved in the company is running on PC’s and are used to RAM costing less than 1/4 that price).

On a side note, does anyone know why Snow Leopard caused such a catastrophic change in After Effects for me? Like I said, I’ve done these types of renders, on the exact same machine, with the same After Effects installed and it used to only take 10 minutes to render at most. So far After Effects is the only program that has been negatively affected by Snow Leopard for me.

[Adrian Jans]

Yeah, thats what I tried, still gave me the same ridiculous render times. Anything else?

[Adrian Jans]

Darn, unfortunately my render (for a 40 second clip) has already taken 20 min. and is only 1/4 of the way through. Anything else I can try?

[Adrian Jans]

Thanks a bunch, I’ll test that out right away.