NEW TO AE AND EDITING IN GENERAL...NEW MB AIR 2020 M1 8G RAm 512 storage and AE keeps crashing?

Your system does not meet the minimum system requirements. When the M1 Mac came out, I bought a basic Mac Mini to run tests, and After Effects worked fine if I loaded creative cloud on an external drive. I used this enclosure with a 2 TB Samsung SSD. I also put the Library and cache folders there. The Mac Mini worked better than expected. I don't think you will get your MacBook Air to work reliably without a similar setup. There is not enough storage for the apps, the cache, and anything else on your system. You are pushing the system beyond recommendations.

Now let's talk about render times. After Effects calculates every pixel on every layer and every effect for every frame. An NLE like Premiere Pro looks at the frames, not individual pixels, so it previews faster and renders faster. When you use the Adobe Media Encoder, a copy of After Effects opens in the background, eating up additional resources. With your minimum system, it would be good to close all other apps, including After Effects, when you are rendering with the Media Encoder. The Render Queue is always more efficient and can reduce the initial render times by more than 50% on some projects. The Render Queue/Output Module will only export using frame-based codecs. It is great for creating production masters that you can add a Premiere Pro timeline or add directly to the Media Encoder to render your video for sharing. H.264 MP4 is the standard for streaming now, and it is crucial to follow the streaming service guidelines to assure the best quality. The included YouTube and Vimeo presets should be used without modification for those streaming services. 

The time it takes to render depends entirely on the frame size, frame rate, and composition structure. I often create VFX composites with dozens of effects and layers. Render times on these complex projects can quickly climb to more than a minute a frame. When the render times rise to more than a couple of minutes a frame, I start redesigning the workflow. I'm not sure if it is still the case, but the design goals for Pixar used to call for a maximum render time of seven minutes a frame using their monster machines. 

With your minimum system, I recommend that you do not use frame rates higher than 29.97 and keep the frame size to 1080 X 1920 pixels. With the latest After Effects versions, you can display the time required to render a specific frame. You could try exposing the modified properties of layers that take a long time to render (uu) and start resetting things or turning off effects to discover the bottlenecks. A 22-second shot is a very long shot. Most AE comps should not contain more than one shot. Most of mine are under 7 seconds because I work primarily on feature film and music video production. If there are cuts between shots in your comp, split them up into individual comps, render the sections and then load them into Premiere Pro for final editing. That is the professional workflow. 

I hope this helps a bit. Three hours to render a 22-second video may be completely normal. If the frame rate is 60 and you change it to 30, the render time will drop to an hour and a half. It is 60 fps and 4K, and you drop the comp size to HD and change the frame rate to 30, and the render time could drop to about 25 minutes. 

A quick tips even if you can't see the preview just open the template and wait, sometimes a heavy template can take a couple of minutes to see the first frame. also, an 8 GB ram is too small for AE so try to close all other apps while you use AE