Long Media Pending Wait Time to Export

Hi all -

So at the facility I work at we often deal with editing long shows, sometimes going up to 5 hours with many gigabytes of content.

The problem I run into with the projects is if I cut 10 or so sequences out of a 5 hour show and want to export them all at once I will use Media Encoder to queue them all up. When I do this they just sit there, media pending, for a very long time. It seems that Encoder is opening up the project again and building it up in the background even though I just dragged the sequences from Premiere directly.

What am I doing wrong, how can I speed this up so they will instantly queue with pending for such a long time?

Thank you for any help!