I've been getting a very strange issue with AE CC on my iMac. I'm compositing an animated short film and have been getting a lot of application hangs and crashes. The comps have layered PSDs as backgrounds, QuickTime Prores 4444+alpha for characters and PreRenders as TIFF sequences. While working wiht these scenes, I've experienced an excessive amount of spinning beach balls and around 5 - 10 necessary force quits a day. The strange thing is that when I notice that the application is starting to hang up, if I hit "Command+Space" quickly to bring up the Mac Spotlight textbox, AE releases from the beachball and starts working again. I've not noticed this on AE CS6 or any other application. I have the activity monitor up at all times because of this issue but I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary.
I've rebuilt the spotlight database, turned it on and off through the terminal, added the drives to the privacy tab in the system preferences, rebuild the spotlight index files, cleaned the user, system and font caches, booted in safe mode and even upgraded the OS from 10.7.5 to 10.8.4, but the problem is still occurring. I've gone through and uninstalled several applications as well, but it's still happening. my source is located on an external thunderbolt RAID.
System Specs:
AE CC 12.0.0.404
iMac 27" mid 2011 (12,2) 3.4 Ghz i7
16Gb Ram, Radeon HD 6970m 2Gb vRam
internal SSD - Main system & Applications drive, 2TB Internal Secondary.
Source footage is on a 15TB external Thunderbolt Arc-8050 Raid-6
Drobo-2nd gen for Time Machine