Re: whats with the speed of after effects?

Mark,

I work with some insanely expensive, high-end hardware/software (iQ, Smoke, Flame) they are as slow and sometimes even slower than AE. Compositing footage or animating ot making VFX for movies takes a lot of time. It all depends on the footage, effects, lights, 3D, your RAM, CPU etc. If you can't load the entire preview in RAM you should lower the preview quality or make the work area shorter (B in, N out), or maybe render out a file preview.

Realtime compositing isn't here yet.