[Richie Tovell] " I was about to put 8 processors and 32 gig in this machine, from what I've read from other users this hasn't made much improvement to render times."
With multi-processing, After Effects will launch multiple instances of itself to render frames simultaneously. You will see a huge improvement in your render time if your renders are CPU-bound (meaning it takes longer to crunch the numbers than it does to read the source data and write the output).
If your renders are memory-bound (meaning you are working with many huge images) or disk-bound (meaning the CPU idles while your machine loads all the source footage), then adding processing power won't help.
[Richie Tovell] "If adding more Ram can't extent the available preview time I already have then in what way will it help? Would I see faster render times and faster Ram previews?"
You've got 8 GB of RAM in a dual-core machine right now. That's 4 GB per core, so you won't see much benefit from adding more, unless you are trying to run other programs at the same time. If you step up to an 8-core machine, then you will definitely want to add more RAM.
[Richie Tovell] "I've read that AE allocates 4 gig per available processor, with sufficient processors and ram available to AE surely we would see this resulting in 4 gig of Ram preview, no?"
I believe that RAM previews "belong" to the main instance of After Effects, which must also hold memory for everything else in the program, so you'll never get all 4 GB for the RAM preview. This is one of the reasons why AE going 64-bit in its next release is such a big deal.
Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production
