render fails

[Arrakis]

I have a 30 second comp that Im trying to render.  It has 1 light, 1 camera and. illustrator layers and some pretty basci animation.  Media encoder first tells me will take 12 hours to render then after an hour it fails and stops encoding. I m just trying to render to h264.  Been working on this project for a few weeks and now cant seem to render it.  I have no clue why. Any idea?

[John V Knowles]

H.264 is highly compressed, which can often add a lot of strain on a computer in addition to the essential task of rendering out the comp successfully. This happens sometimes in Premiere Pro as well where an MP4 export will fail. I suggest exporting to a less-compressed codec like ProRes; try rhe "high quality" setting directly out of After Effects, then drop that rendered file into Media Encoder to make your MP4.