Oh, man. Something so simple that I had forgotten since I took an initial course in AE back 6 years ago or so and then took a long break from AE. Wow, I feel stupid! I'd recently been working in After Effects on a very regular basis (mostly using just a few color "correction" effects and the rotobrush) but usually the clips were so short, the only problem I had would be the rotobrush taking forever to propagate.
Now brings me to a problem I am still having. I am using After Effects only for the depth of field effects, as I had mentioned. I am using a very simple mask with a blur effect, or I use the rotobrush tool with a blur on the identical video layer underneath. The rotobrush is so so very slow going through the frames and I think it may be because I shot in 59.94 fps. Is this the issue?
Edit: I am realizing that I probably should not have shot in 59.94 fps. I just wanted to try and have it at the best settings and in doing some reading, I'm seeing that a higher frame rate does not necessarily mean higher quality video. I just recently purchased this video camera for an entirely different project and this was the first time I've really put it to use.
Then when everything comes back into Premiere (I am using dynamic link), I need to render preview to see if everything looks the way I want. I have maybe 5 min of footage that I used the masks on in After Effects, and it takes HOURS to render preview in Premiere. I am going to Sequence>Render In to Out to accomplish this. It seems impossible to get anything done. I am beginning to think I simply do not have enough RAM (8 GB) and will be going to work tomorrow on a Mac desktop tomorrow to see if things improve. Do you think it is just an issue with the RAM or am I going to encounter this same problem tomorrow?