Internal verification failure, sorry! {no current context}

Was in the middle of previewing playback for the final compisition for my video and it suddenly stopped full playback.  it would only playback the first few seconds and a few last seconds of the comp that was cached. so i restarted AE, and got the internal verification failure. I've tried purping memory, puring memory & cache, reinstalling AE, restarting my mac multiple times, nothing is working. Still getting error and playback issue. Now I I had added nothing new to the project around the time this started, no non-native plugins involved. It was just literally mid-preview it suddenly kicked in. There are a couple areas of the video marked blue that will playback if i select them specifically, but if I try to preview the video at all outside of those areas, it gives me the 'preview needs at least 2 frames' error. If I put the comp through render queue as Mov, the file is unplayable. I need to get these projects wrapped by Monday

Also - now I can't connect to Media Encoder at all.

Using iMac 27:

• 3.6GHz 10-core 10th-generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz
• 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory
• 4TB SSD storage
• Radeon Pro 5700 XT with 16GB of GDDR6 memory

No settings were changed, no other Adobe products running, nothing intensive in the background that would cause this.