So I implemented all of the suggestions from Dave and Walter, and I also tried rendering as a TIFF sequence as opposed to JPEG, based on a suggestion from Mylenium over at the Adobe forums (https://forums.adobe.com/message/2697994#2697994). Render still crashed after about 40 frames. I’ve bitten the bullet and started pre-rendering out my pre-comps in hopes that AE can handle it better now. Thanks for all the suggestions.
Installed the update, turned off open gl, and reduced cpu’s to AE. Left the render going overnight and will post best results/settings. Should I have enable layer cache and multiprocessing switched on? I do now.