[Aaron Leong] “HDV 1080i60 footage”
Is your source footage HDV? I’d recommend transcoding to a different codec (HDV uses MPEG-2 compression, and AE doesn’t like that so much).
Other than that, pre-render anything you can get away with, check the ‘secret preferences’ as Dave suggests, enable the disk cache and if you have multiprocessing disabled, try enabling that (I don’t think it will help the problem, but things should move faster).
Does AE fail at pretty much the same time in the render every time? I would guess that it is. In that case AE is having trouble rendering one particular layer in your composition that may be effects heavy, the nature of AE’s renderer is such that if AE can render the most RAM intensive layer in your composition without any trouble then it should be able to render the entire composition without trouble (this can be complicated when you have 3D shadows, since these contribute to memory requirements significantly and only appear when multiple layers ‘interact’ with each other).
Related articles:
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WSF13D6BED-C53B-408a-B2D6-C8B4205D4FB7.html
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WS9F936D13-E76A-41e4-BF8F-577132AB4723.html
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA