[Michael Smith]

I have tested trimming the composition and it took the 42 seconds to render a 60 second clip with 10 seconds of fractal and nothing else, and it took 40 seconds to render a 60 second clip with around 35 seconds of fractal. I did test changing the magnification with a default keyframe, one amplitude keyframe, and another default keyframe at the end, all connected by linear magnification changes, and this render would have taken 3 minutes. So, while it does take longer to render a change, trimming doesn’t affect the time to render and it seems like after effects doesn’t even have a detector for the simple and obvious case of “this frame is gonna be the same for this entire duration, let’s just keep putting the frame into the hard disk from memory/cache/registers and only do that”.

Also, I still don’t know whether it is possible to enable and disable effects. I guess that it isn’t though, and I really wonder why these shortcomings should even be happening in a program that has thousands of hours of professional coding done on it.

Yeah so can someone recommend a different program? Preferably one that still has expressions, but which renders quickly, and that can also record audio tracks while playing back video and compensate for latency?