After Effects render time on MacBook Pro

Hi Guys,

Just need some help. Here's my situation.
I own a 2.0GHz Duo Core Macbook Pro, with 1GB RAM,
and 128MB on my Radeon video card. I made a 30 second after effects (7.0 Professional, legit copy ) project last week, some simple camera fly thru's with motion blur and depth of field turned on. No other effects. It took me 4hours and 53 mins to render. Now here's my problem. I took the same project to work and rendered it on the Macpro that we have, it only takes 38 minutes.That's no suprise to me. But when i tried it on the MacBook Pro we also have at work,which is a core 2 duo, 2.33GhZ with 2GB RAM and 256MB Video Card, it only takes about 1 hour and 25 mins. So my question is, is my machine really that slow, 4 times longer than the 2.33Ghz MBP at work, or am i doing something wrong. The final output is uncompressed 8-bit. Please please help me! It's kinda frustrating... I'm running it on mac os x. Any after effects guru around? Or tweakmysters! Cheers guys!

The Mac Pro is obviously a more powerful machine. It won't take as long to render on that machine, that is a given.

It has never taken me hours to render out on my PowerBook (G4 1.67Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 128MB graphics running AE 7.0 Pro), no matter how long the project was.

When you have 3D layers, it will take longer, but it shouldn't take 4 hours for :30 worth of a project. What else did you have running at the time it was rendering out? What compression did you use? Animation is going to take a long time. Did you use the same compression on the work machines?
How many layers were there? Did you maybe check/uncheck any for the various renders?

Yeah, i know that my machine's not as fast as the MacPro

I had 3d layers on, motion blur on for all layers, depth of the camera was on...
No other applications running, I used Uncompressed 8 bit, 720X576 PAL,
Yeah, i used the same compression at work as well...i had a about 7 pre comps,
about 10 layers each, and that was that...nothing else i remembered i did.
I did try something though, in render settings, i turned on opengl renderer,
that did it for me in only 8 minutes, the problem was the motion blur and depth of field didn't show up in the quicktime file...i don't mind it rendering for that long for a complicated project, but this one wasn't.

You should start up all systems from scratch, start Activity Monitor (AM) in the Applications/Utilities folder and then start your rendering.

In AM click on the System Memory tab and watch to see if any Page Outs are occurring. If so, memory is being swapped out to the hard drive so other work can occur. If your own MBP has higher page outs, then you likely need to upgrade your memory to the full 2GB.

I'd also click on the "% CPU" column so that the highest user of cpu resources is displayed at the top. You might see something else going on in your system that you forgot about.

Lastly, I read somewhere that the graphics processor in the new MBP C2D machines runs faster than in the CD laptops. So perhaps the greater speed and more video ram is a contributing factor. I doen't know of a tool to monitor that part of the system.

Lastly is the obvious. Is After Effects 7 a native Intel application or the older Power PC code. For the timing comparison to be of value, the same version should be running on all systems.

Thanks Xstep. Will definately try your suggestions.
The After Effects 7.0 is native to PPC not Intel. All the machine i tried on has the same software... I check out the rest, try and see what i did wrong.
Any other suggestions would be much appreciated...maybe some internal settings in after effects that i'm messed up?
Cheers buddy!