I would love to rant on the ROI tool a bit... because it's never worked for me?
In my experience, it doesn't behave like a true ROI tool should - meaning, if I draw an ROI, I would expect AE to only render that part of the comp. But from what I could always tell, AE is so heavily dependent on rendering inefficiently huge tiles and/or entire frames that it still renders everything. I get no noticeable speed up rendering a small ROI area than I do rendering the entire frame with most of my projects.
Case in point, if I render the whole frame of a comp, for say 30 frames and it takes a minute, then if I render half of the comp I would expect it to take 15 seconds. 1/4 the pixels. No, it takes a minute.
If I render an ROI ram preview and then change the ROI by dragging it larger, it instantly shows the rest of the comp. It doesn't need to rerender the "unseen" image... it already has it rendered. Why does anyone use it? I understand you can use it to pass crop info but otherwise, no no no... not how it should be.
Nuke does it right, and it will exponentially speed your workflow with the tool working as it should. AE should only load and render the subsection of the frame that the ROI is parked on.
I don't expect AE to become a scanline renderer, but tiled or no, I want that ROI speed boost.
But I would love to hear that it actually does what I think it should and I've been missing something all these years...