Echo video effect in Premiere Pro 2020 taking days to render on new PC

I shot a series of nightlapse photos of the night sky with a GoPro 6 Black and imported the photos (455 photos at approx 2.35MB each) as a video sequence into Premiere Pro 2020 using the import as sequence option. I then sped the imported video clip up (original length 10 seconds, accelerated length 5 seconds), added a Lumetri Colour effect, and straightened out the GoPro lens rounding using Lens Distortion. The stars in the sequence weren't really 'popping' so I went to Video Effects > Time > Echo in order to replicate this star trails effect. Echo settings of my 5 second clip are: Echo Time 0.03, Number of Echoes 125, Starting Intensity 1, Decay 0.99, Echo Operator: Maximum. A preview would not display (froze or was black), and Premiere Pro kept crashing as I played around with the Echo settings (hovering over a setting and scrolling left and right was a non-starter). As I couldn't see a preview, I created a duplicate clip with different settings (Echo Time -0.03) so I would have two results to look at post-render. After starting the render, the estimated render time for these two clips was initially 15 hours. It has now been over 24 hours and it is still rendering, with an estimated 7 hours left.

Relevant specs of my newly built computer are: Intel Core i7-9700K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor, Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI ATX LGA 1151 Motherboard, 32GB DDR4-3600 Memory, Western Digital SN750 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME SSD, Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8 GB Windforce OC 3X Video Card. Premiere Pro, along with all media for the project (approx 5GB), is sitting on the SSD. Any advice or suggestions as to why render times for this effect are so inflated and why Premiere Pro keeps crashing when adjusting the settings of this effect would be greatly appreciated. Note I have not seen any render time abnormalities when applying other effects such as warp stabiliser. Thanks!