After Effects CC 2014 only using 30% of CPU when rendering

Question

I've scoured the internet for details but there's surprisingly little help when it comes to After Effects and performance.
Basically, I built a new workstation awhile ago with the hopes of really speeding up my video editing as I was starting to do a lot more. Here are the specs:
Core i7-4930k
32 GB RAM @ 1600MHz
Stock GeForce 780
Samsung 840 EVO 500GB OS drive
Crucial 240 GB SSD for Scratch Disk
3TB WD Red for Mass Storage
Windows 8.1
I must say that I've been quite disappointed so far with the setup when it comes to the CPU, especially After Effects. I would think the 6 core would greatly outperform my old 4 core, but I've found hardly any performance improvements, and in fact have seen it perform worse in a number of situations. And I think the issue is that somehow, After Effects is not fully using the CPU. Whenever rendering or previewing, all 6 physical cores as well as the 6 logical cores hover around 30% usage. Never any more. And yet, the comp it's rendering could be chugging away at maybe 2-3 frames per second, and it could clearly go faster with more CPU usage. Heat isn't throttling anything as all the cores are still at a very cool 48-50 C, and this is just pretty basic air cooling. It's definitely not being pushed that much.
I don't think it's the CPU itself as Maya gladly takes up as much CPU as possible and my render times on that have improved dramatically. After Effects however (and Premiere when not using GPU effects) can be quite slow. It's especially frustrating when other older, clearly slower computers end up rendering my comps faster.
Is there any info at all out there as to why this is? Any advice on troubleshooting? I've tried many things and can't think of anything short of maybe it being an OS issue and having to reformat (which would be quite a pain).
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Martin, I don't know if there's anything Todd or I can say to change your opinions. We try to represent how After Effects works, and why the After Effects team chose to make it work that way, in a way that all users can understand so you can get back to creative work as fast as possible.
What tends to rub us the wrong way are your assertions and accusations about that. For example:
If you guys spent less time listening to the voices you want to hear, and more time on the 'yes some time difficult to hear' but nether the less valid concerns of experienced users, you would have addressed this fundermental flaw years ago.
We gave constructive feedback whilst part of that program and none of it was ever addressed. There seemed to be a weird attitude to any criticism which didn't fit the given narrative.
I'm sure you probably see it differently and it is great to hear it is being addressed.
That last statement is quite true, your perspective is your own. From our perspective, your statements do not reflect how the After Effects team interacts with After Effects users, either the users in our prerelease program or users who are not a part of that program. Fact is that we spend a lot of time talking with users: in forums, at user groups, on the phone, via email, and by visiting work sites. We take notes and discuss as a group what we learned, and use that feedback to guide the future development of After Effects. It's not all sunshine and roses, we hear plenty of negative things about After Effects. This is important as it helps us understand how to make After Effects better. At the same time, we're also cognizant that we have many different types of users with different needs and workflows, and we can't make all users happy all of the time.
What I think is not visible to you, or to most After Effects users, is how we prioritize the development of After Effects. There are many factors that go into that, starting with input from users but also including (in no particular order) fixing bugs and general improvements, industry trends, changes in hardware and software environments, maintaining a large and complex codebase (some of which is shared with other Adobe applications), maintaining interoperability with other applications (both Adobe and non-Adobe), and ultimately delivering a product that people want to use. To see how all that comes together is harder to communicate; really, you would need to sit down with us and watch us work.
The more relevant point here, Martin, is that you appear to disagree with how much priority we've given to performance improvements in After Effects. You indicate that you would prefer that we had started on this work a long time ago.
All work we do in After Effects comes at the cost of work we don't do. I'm confident that you're like me in that you have a long list of enhancements, beyond performance, that you'd like to see in After Effects. But the After Effects team is relatively small for such a complex application, and the scope of the performance-related improvements we are currently making is huge, a massive re-wiring of the application. Doing this work in a reasonable amount of time, with the number of people that we have, with as few moving parts as possible, is tricky. In that context I hope you can see that it has not been easy for us to justify putting the entire team on this effort and doing no other work, no creative features, no workflow improvements, no fixing of long-standing bugs and gotchas, etc. What is important is that this work is now in progress.
On that note, I need to temper any expectations that you may be building based on this conversation. We're laying the groundwork for the future of After Effects, and the first iteration of performance improvements that you see next year might not meet your expectations if we hype it up too much. We plan to share specific detail when we get closer to a public release, but suffice that what we are doing now is absolutely necessary for even better things to come later.
We understand your frustrations, that you'd like After Effects to be faster. We're working on it, and we appreciate your patience. We also appreciate constructive comments and questions.