How do I make long videos using After Effects?
There is no way to &quot;bypass&quot; long render times. After-Effects needs to calculate where every pixel has to be and then pack all this information into a container such as .mov or .mp4. However, you can speed up render time by enabling hardware-acceleration in the settings of After-Effects. You can also increase the amount of RAM allocated to After-Effects. Lastly, make sure you render the file in a reasonable resolution (1920x1080 is good enough for most cases) with a reasonable framerate (for a podcast you can probably get away with 24 frames per second, depending on how responsive the audio-spectrum is probably even 20.)
That said, on your hardware, 2 hours of rendering for an effect like that over 30 minutes is not unreasonable and perfectly normal. Try out the optimization I suggested above and see if you can speed up the process a bit.