Rendering failed.

When I get a failed render the very first thing I do is select all layers in the comp and press the "u" key twice to see every modified property on every layer. If you know what frame causes the failure you can look for anything that might be suspicious. Particular can eat up your system resources that might be the first place to change something like lowering the number of particles.  You can quickly pinpoint a problematic effect by simply turning off the effect in the timeline. 

Another option is to render an image sequence. When the render fails, set the work area to the last rendered frame and see if AE will pick up the render at that point. If it was a system resource problem, most of the time the render will successfully pick up, then you can import your images sequence to AE or Premiere Pro and render your distribution copies from there. 

Let us know what you find. If I have a comp that takes more than a couple of seconds a frame to render I almost always render to a lossless codec like GoPro Cineform or Prorez instead of going directly to the AME. If the comp takes longer than 4 or 5 seconds a frame I always render an image sequence using the Render Queue and Render Garden because you can always pick up a failed render and you never have to render the same frame twice.

Well, no offense, but an "Everything but the kitchen sink." approach is probably not really helpful. There's so many third-party plug-ins in your project and they all use hardware acceleration functions like OpneGL to some degree, it's easy enough to predict that you will eventually simply run out of resources, especially when throwing AE's own GPU stuff on top. Having by today's standard limited RAM also does not realyl help. At the very least set some of the plug-ins to software-only rendering modes and disable AE's/ AME's hardware accleration. Otherwise restructure your project and pre-render some of the processing, then reimport and finalize it with teh rest of the effects.

Mylenium