8K R3D Footage Crashing After Effects

Hi all! I am posting a short film entirely shot on Red Helium with 8K. Footage looks glorious and I'd like to work with the raw right up until delivering at 4K. However, there are a lot of VFX I am creating in After Effects and I am having a lot of issues working with the R3D footage. AE is crashing pretty much constantly as I work with the high-end footage. I did a test transcoding a file from 8K to ProRes 4K and experienced no issues that way so I know it's the footage that's just too much for my system to handle.

Does anybody have any ideas for how I could process/transcode the footage to make it a little less system-intensive while maintaining the HDR & resolution of the footage?

System Specs:

iMac Retina 5K, 27-Inch 2020

3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9

128 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB