Imported PSD results in long export times with no animation?

Hello All,

I am working ona collaboration with a friend, where they provided me with a relatively simple PSD that consists of a background layer, and 10 layers of images on top of that.

The image is about 12000x4800 - and the animation i created puts some simple effects on the images, and slowly pans around.

The issue i'm having is that aftereffects wants 40 hours to render this:

I noticed that just by enabling the background layer with nothing on it, after effects wants 5 hours; but with just a single layer with a simple effect, the time drop dramatically to a more reasonable level --- that leads me to believe the imported photoshop layers are being treated not as just images, but somethign different leading to this long export time.

----is there something I can do to rasterize / render my layers in the comp so they are just treated like normal images (I noticed how they still have the photoshop icon logo in the time lane)?

Thank you!