Quick render with CS4 After Effect

Question

Gentlemen
Footage 1080p 24fps
Win 7 Ultimate 32 bit
6GB Ram
Dear friends , I mostly work on my songs, they are 5 mins long the most, after adding all effect , transitions and etc, i send it to "Render Queue" to make a movie , everytime I send it to render queue to make a movie or render it, since my system is not all that , it takes about 20 hours to finish and I could watch my music video, but I was wondering if there is a short way to render my project or song, so I can b able to see the full song , find my mistakes and correct them.
The quality has to be decent, otherwise I won't be able to tell if the color correction I mde is good enough.
If the final rendering takes that long, I don't mind b/c I am gonna be done with my song .
Which will be a 720x480 quicktime HD.
Many thanks.

Answer 1

In your render queue click Best Settings to the right of Render Settings: and set the resolution to Half in the Render Settings window.  This will make it so that a 1920x1080 comp will be rendered at a resolution of 960x540 and based on my tests, the renders tend to be about 1/3 faster:
The good thing about doing it this way is if you render to a production codec, and you like the test render you don't even have to bother re-rendering because you can just stick the clip back into After Effects and scale it to fit a comp using the NTSC DV Widescreen 23.976 Preset and render it out again:
Or if you're just going to put your video on YouTube or Vimeo I would use the Adobe Media Encoder YouTube preset and edit it to match your needs.  Check here to find out how:
Also, if you have access to a Mac for rendering you should check out AERenderQ, which is a super useful droplet application that allows you to render your After Effects comps in the background using the Terminal, which can greatly speed things up.