Animating shapes vs masks in After Effects Can anyone tell me how I'm going to get the best performance out of AE - I have a number of circles I need to animate expanding which are essentially stroked lines.  Just made some paths with very thick strokes and it seems to be chugging a bit.  I'm wondering if I would be better off with a Solid, with a circular mask on it, if that's faster to render - more over, I'm looking for a document that explains how Shape layers are rendered vs Masks.

Is there any reading anywhere on performance for this kind of thing? Have any of you come across this?

Edit

I'm running a iMac, 27-inch, Mid 2011

Processor  3.4 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory  8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Graphics  AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB

Software  Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63b)
Rendering a series of expanding circles (say less that 20) should not be a particularly slow task.

Check this page about how to improve performance in AE. http://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/improve-performance.html

AE doesn't render the same way as non-linear editors like Final Cut or Premiere, so rendering can take longer (but users are usually working on shorter sequences than in FCP).

When you are preparing your work, try to work at lower quality settings, ie at 25% zoom, or quarter resolution, only zooming to 100% to check specific frames - get the motion working correctly at a lower res - this will save you a lot of time.

I don't think animating paths rather than masks will make a particular difference to the speed.