Lol, yeah, previewing in After Effects in a pain for me too. Real time previewing in there gives no sound and I can usually only get like 15-30 second worth or RAM preview at a time, more or less, depending on how big the stuff is. Also, every time I change anything in the clip, I have to re-render it to preview the changes.
I just use it for titles, masking, compositing and motion graphics, but even those I just make the clips then render em out and import to Premier Pro for regular editing since I can get full realtime previews in Premier with no problems.