After Effects simply will no longer render now.

[Whitney Motion]

After Effects simply will no longer render now.

I set the queue and file paths, all of that works fine.  Hit Render -- Nothing happens.  Also this is the worst timing possible.  
The rendering was working completely fine earlier today and then for no clear reason it stopped working. 

MacBook Pro
Apple M4 Pro
48 GB

I closed and restarted, reset preferences, then I was able to view the comp.  Then it simply stopped working again.  I have a bunch of precomps I was going to pre-render all of them roughly 737x246 so there is no reason why this shouldn't work.  Rendering them out as Quicktime 4444 RGB+Alpha.

What is going on with After Effects, I have never ran into more issues in my 20 years of using this software than the amount of brick walls that I have run into this year.  What am I paying this company for??  Higher cortisol levels, come on man..... 

Please assist.

[Paul Uu]

Well this is certainly not good.

Basic questions:

Did anything change with your system or the Mac's environment between the good state of earlier this morning and the current bad state?

Software installed, display configuriation changed, network changes, drive config changes (including Dropbox/Google Drive, etc.), OS updates, etc., etc.?

Anything change with your AE state or this specific project's state: 3rd party plugins applied, scripts or other external extensions (e.g. Animation Composer) now running, etc., etc.?

Beyond those basic config pieces, probably the most direct diagnosis step is to generate an After Effects Log file for a session where the rendering fails, and then paste it here.

1. In AE, go to Help: Enable Logging.
2. Restart as required and proceed to invoke the render failure.
3. Help: Reveal Log File
4. A couple of OS windows will be revealed showing various logging files. The one we want here is After Effects Log.txt.
5. Open in Text Edit, copy the log contents and paste them here.