I've been trying to build a 720x486 test project with AE. But, I'm having difficulty getting the program to render previews using shift+preview. Seems that it won't RAM preview much beyond a minute which isn't the length of the work area.

I've got 15 3D layers, a camera, light and audio layer. I've reduced the resolution to 1/3 and disk cache is enabled. I've got a Dell P4, XPSP2, w/2GB RAM and plenty of storage.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I would like to build projects with AE in the 4 to 5 minute range. Is that beyond this program's capacity?
Thanks for any advice,
Bob

You can try increasing the size of After Effect's Cache. To do so, go to Edit>Preferences>Cache. Adobe does not recommend going over 90% for the Image Cache Size (which affects RAM previews), and 200% for Maximum Memory Usage (which affects virtual memory usage, like the Windows page/swap file).