After Effects Preview Clean, AME Render Flickers, Complex Expression Issue

I’ve been working full‑time in After Effects for years, and recently a client who runs a Korean movies website: https://tvmon.com.co/ asked us to create a branded homepage video.

The project itself was straightforward: a logo reveal, bilingual type, and a dynamic grid of thumbnails. But during editing I ran into one of the strangest technical issues I’ve seen in a while. The animation looked perfect inside AE’s preview and even rendered fine through the internal Render Queue, but the moment I sent it to Adobe Media Encoder with multi‑frame rendering enabled, random flickers and one‑frame freezes started appearing in the grid comp.

What makes it maddening is that the problem isn’t consistent—different frames glitch on each render, and sometimes the flicker is subtle, sometimes it’s obvious. I suspected collapsed transformations combined with time‑remap and expressions using valueAtTime were clashing with AME’s evaluation order, but even after baking keyframes, disabling Posterize Time, and trying every YouTube “fix” I could find, the issue persists

Has anyone else dealt with non‑deterministic flicker like this when using AME with nested comps and expressions? I’d love to hear if there’s a reliable way to force deterministic evaluation or if the only safe path is to avoid AME entirely for this type of setup.