Massive thanks to Jake & Poppa for tech help. We’ve now fixed my Pr playback issues, and the rendering problem. For some reason Af defaulted back to animation settings despite me never using it so I now have to re-render all the scenes again.
It seems that animation clips just didn’t agree with my computer and replacing those should fix the other full movie render issues I was having.
I’m still getting drop frames on Af playback so it’s still a nightmare to finish the crackling saber but I should be able to continue those scenes now.
Love this community! Thanks for all the help folks. 🏆