(Dynamic link) STILL can't get After Effects to send video to Media Encoder, even on 17.5

Hey UON,

The same thing is happening to me. Fairly new to AE and ME but I have taken the same steps as you to resolve this issue to no avail. 

I was able to workaround by exporting my AE file to a .mov and then import that in to ME. Once I did that, I was able to render and export from ME without any issue. 

I agree, however, from what I understand the issues with Dynamic Link Server have been going on for a long time and despite countless updates, there is still no fix. Extremely frustrating. 

Let me know if you have heard anything new. 

It happens on both complex projects and projects with just a couple of compositions and 6 layers of video files in them.

Third party plugins (still happens without all of these):

Neat Video 5.3
RealGlow
Trapcode Soundkeys

PC Specs:
AMD Ryzen 1800x running at stock speeds
32GB DDR4 Ram at 2933 mhz
1x RTX 2080 TI
1x GTX 1080 TI
256 GB Samsung 960 EVO NVME system drive
1TB APACER SSD for scratch disk
7 hard drives (3-6 TB) for footage
Windows 10 Pro with every latest update
Nvidia Studio Driver 456.71 (latest)

Things I've tried to fix this:
- Fully uninstall everything adobe from my system, use creative suite cleaner tool to clean up everything else
- Deleted all adobe folders
- Re-installed without importing preferences
- Clean wipe of Display drivers
- Full permission for adobe apps in Windows Firewall
- Taking my most complex projects that I couldn't send to AME and importing them into a new project, and deleting almost all the unnecessary files and comps from the new project
- Removing all markers from project
- Setting different workspaces in AE, disabling hardware acceleration, clearing everything from disk/media cache and memory, force-quitting different adobe processes.
- Installing AE 17.5 and AME 14.5 when they became available, when the same thing still happened I repeated the Adobe removal process above but got the same results!

Findings:
- So I have a stack of comps that I use to denoise each layer of a psd image sequence. The first comp is the psd sequece separated into layers, which is withing the second comp which denoises it, then that goes to the third comp for color correction etc. I activate each layer from the first comp and export it from the last. Usually only the first one I try after I open AE gets sent to AME, then no other ones get send, even if I restart AE.

I noticed in my windows processes that AfterFX.exe appears twice, one using around 10 GB of memory, the other only using 1-2 GB. If I force-close the smaller one, AE stays open and I am able to send another layer to AME. The smaller AfterFX.exe shows up in the process list again, so I have to force-close it again to send another layer. If that doesn't work, I have to quit both AE and AME, kill their processes which stay open for some reason, then open AE and try again.

Now even when using this method, if I either click on render or on the encoder settings, it'll get stuck on "Connecting to project" or "reading XMP" for at least 20 minutes. It will still render eventually, but it gets stuck on the next render the same way. So encoding a series of files to video takes like 5 hours instead of 1.

I tried something else today. I manually re-built my layer denoising project from scratch instead of importing anything from the previous version. It seems to work like it should, but I seriously do NOT want to rebuild my most complex projects from scratch.