Why is Cineware process crippling my CPU?

I have a 40 second project with some 40 comps with some simple scale and position animation, 1 camera and 4 lights and apart from a couple of color curves, no effects all using Classic 3d renderer.  Something has gone wrong and it is now taking forever to ram render (nearly an hour and only the first 8 seconds have rendered) and when I export to make a Prores 4444+alpha render in Media encoder it quotes me 4 and a half hours. The last render I did result in a 1.6gb .mov file.

I have allocated 52gb of memory to both AE and Media Encoder. Which they are hardly touching... When I check Activity Monitor/Memory, total memory used is 35.13, App memory = 29.45, Wired Mory = 4.36gb Compressed = 1.03gb  AE is using 3.05gb Media Encoder 590mb and Cineware 593mb

However, when I check CPU usage.  Cineware = 888% (at times up to 1400%)  aerendercore = 185% and Media Encoder 9.9%  Total CPU load is oscillating form some 70% to 98% and meantime everything else on my mac has slowed to a stuttering grind.

I am working on a MacbookPro 16"  2019 2.3 Ghz 8-Core Intel Core i9 with Radeon 5500M  8gb and 64gb system memory. 

Why, if my project is entirely using Classic 3d would the cineware process need to hijack so much system resource.  And....why if I have so much available excess memory available would AE + Encoder not make efficient use of it? Any thoughts on where I should focus to troubleshoot this would be most appreciated.