Proxy Effects or adding "render only" option to heavy intense effects
Some effects like camera lens blur are computationally expensive. It would be great to be able to have a proxy effects such as Gaussian blur during previews, but at render time turn off Gaussian blur and turn on camera lens blur. Or perhaps have a setting that only turns it on at render time. I imagine it could be a drop down that says "off until render." I know I can turn off all effects on a layer or composition, but then I have to remember to turn them on before rendering.

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Jakob Thorhallsson commented
There is a great plugin on AEScripts called RenderHog which does exactly this. It works really well and even has the function of assigning replacement effects for the more heavy effects. I.e. you can have a 20px Lens Blur replaced by a 20px Fast Blur which then gets swapped again while you export. The only downside is you have to get used to it and make sure you enable the fx before you export.
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Chad Gilmour commented
Or even just have the ability to tie an effects on/off status to an expression control, so you just click on 1 effect to turn all the effects of your choosing on or off.
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Jakob Thorhallsson commented
This one! Sometimes when doing blurry objects/out-of-focus tracking you need to have camera lens blur on to see if the track works, but after that it's fairly trivial to render it out again and again. Would be great to have a panel/window where you could customize what effects you want to have "off until render". Match Grain, Lens Blur and Heavy plugins from Red Giant etc. This would literally save my life...
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Antoine Autokroma.com (Independent Developer of AfterCodecs, BRAW Studio, PlumePack, Influx) commented
Agreeed !