[Michael Smith] 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”.
Enable disk caching from the preferences
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.
AE doesn’t render what it doesn’t see. Do you have any other effects/DVE changes going on?
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?”
That doesn’t exist I’m afraid.