Thank you very much for the response.
After I made that post I tried again rendering out the comp to AVI uncompressed (the resulting file was 32 GB), then I ran the AVI file through ProCoder to convert it back to MPEG2 HD format for easier viewing and save space. The whole process took about 20 mins (10 mins render and 10 mins converting) so it’s acceptable.
What baffles me is that I have done similar renders before (rendering a .m2v clip with simple text straight to a new .m2v file) and they never took that long (10 mins top for a 4-5 min clip). Maybe someone messed around with AE on my comp or made some changes that caused this. I had Nucleo Pro installed for a while and it was fine until today. I tried uninstalling it but nothing changed so I guess that’s not the problem.
Also thanks for the tip about image sequence, it’d be great to be able to resume cus rendering is never totally stable 😀