The final file rendered with a soft ding .
For the first hour, After Effects moved like molasses in January. The playhead stuttered. The spinning beach ball of death became her new best friend. At 2:00 AM, she added a particular particle effect—a simple "CC Ball Action"—and the machine simply gave up. The screen froze. The fan roared like a jet engine. Then, silence. adobe after effects system requirements
At 7:00 AM, she hit the final export button. A complex, multi-layered composition with depth-of-field blur, motion blur, and a hundred animated vector shapes. On her laptop, this would have taken three days. On Station Four, the progress bar flew from 0% to 100% in eleven minutes. The final file rendered with a soft ding
She dropped the 4K clip onto the timeline. It played instantly. No proxies. No skipped frames. She added the particle effect that had murdered her laptop. The RAM preview took 1.2 seconds to render. The spinning beach ball of death became her new best friend
“It’s fine,” she lied to herself, dragging a 4K clip into the composition panel.