Maintain performance while working with multiple shape layers (~50 )

Question

Hey guys, I've been working on some projects lately where I need to animate a lot of shape layers cascading, arraying, with various animation properties. When I get to the point of using 30-60 or so shape layers, and they're all doing some kind of scale, position, etc. animations, my computer slows to a complete crawl. This then forces me into using a single shape layer and the repeater functions. These can work well sometimes, and don't hamstring the flexibility too much, UNTIL you need to incorporate varying colors. At that point, I usually switch my shape layers to masks and place a layer below with varying colors as needed. The shape animations then reveal those colors, but this doesn't work for a complex object that in itself requires many colors. Sooo...
What kind of workflows do you all have for working with multiple semi-complex objects at once? I figure I must be missing something, because this has gotten really limiting. Is everyone just working with 256GB of RAM?
FYI, my computer specs are:
2 x 2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
32 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB
OS X 10.9.4 (13E28)
Thanks!!

Answer 1

Pre-comping can speed up your previews if you are using disk cache, but nothing will speed up  your first ram preview or a ram preview after a keyframe change except a better optimized system. All it takes to slow things down is one effect or a footage file that causes AE to start consuming memory and processor power.
As a test I just created a gradient filled rectangle, added rotation keyframes, duplicated the layer so I have 64 copies on my Mac Mini and tried a ram preview compared with the same comp with only 1 layer. Almost no difference in the time it took to preview 10 seconds. Threw in a scale transform for all layers and again, not much difference between one shape layer and 64. To make things much harder I change the rectangle to a Polystar and animated everything in the Polystart transform properties, set up a composition with 128 duplicates and a comp with one layer. 2.5 seconds for a ram preview at quarter rez for a single layer, 10 seconds for a ram preview for 128 layers. That's more than acceptable to me for a two year old Mac Mini with 16 gb of ram. Increasing the zoom factor to 50% with Resolution set to Auto doubled the ram preview time which was still acceptable.
This makes me wonder what else is going on in your composition. Any effects or other things going on? Have you optimized your system for maximum performance? There are links with suggestions for doing that all over this site as well as the Adobe recommendations found here: Optimizing After Effects Performance