Its a fairly simple concept. If you have a group 1 that contains models A, B, and C and you place a Butterfly across the group for the whole sequence but then for 5 second model A has a Spirals effect then that Spirals effect cannot be rendered until the Butterfly is rendered first on the channels. I've never seen anyone try to change the way they sequence to make rendering faster. If you make groups then you usually have a reason for wanting the effects to look that way. Maybe you're PC is just slow. If you share a sequence we can tell you how long it takes for us to render it.
Makes sense now. In your example, you mentioned the model group had an effect through the whole sequence and then 5 seconds for a single model. Just to be clear, is it time based then...meaning does it render from left to right in the timeline? So if I had that model group you mentioned with the butterfly effect but for only the first 30 seconds of the sequence and then that model you mentioned for the latter 30 seconds of the sequence, there would not be conflict in resource usage?
And asking once more since it was buried in my last *long* reply, are threads limited to 1 max per model or model group...meaning I couldn't have two threads handling a single model or model group?
As for my computer, naw, not that slow. I just tend to OCD on things, if you couldn't tell, and I like to make good use of my resources rather than paying $1.5k for a new nicer computer only to find out that I wouldn't get any value in return. But also, at this point, you've piqued my interest into how things run under the covers...sorry again for so many questions.
My current computer is 4 to 5 year old i5 2.33ghz 2 core computer with 16gb memory and 256g ssd. Should be sufficient...but this is also the reason I started this thread.