Why doesn't media encoder use same frame numbers as after effects comps when you export?

It's a nightmare, still in 2021... ME always starts with frame 0, and I miss the "skip existing frames" option.
I simply cannot understand how a company that takes so much money per month can try so hard to make work uncomfortable for its customers.

There's a much better workflow and it involves rendering, from AE, to a very high quality MOV. Then use PPro to double-check the animation, re-sync or add in audio stuff or even perform minor edits. Then, should a specific range require re-rendering in AE, just render out the required range and drop it appropriately in PPro — for such 'repair' renders, I add the Start TC of the 'repair' render's range into the filename to quickly indicate where in time to drop in the MOV. From PPro, with a very high quality Timeline, it's easy and quick to render out to an MP4. You also get the benefit of using PPro's Auto Reframe feature. And when it's time to archive your project, you have a high quality MOV as well as a PPro Project on hand. This workflow may take a bit of time to get accustomed to but the benefits are awesome.

Same issue here, would love to use media encoder to save frames that correspond to the current project, regardless of what section of the project I'm rendering. 

Same issue. Not just that, but can't net render without overwriting frames. It should just skip to the next image in the sequence. What's the point of a watch folder if every computer in the network is overwriting each other?

Hi I just want to give my support to all of you guys trying to explain what original poster means, yes we need Adobe Media Encoder to not offer less rendering options than After Effects itself as it is supposed to be a dedicated rendering software, and yet if you need it to name the files according to frame number the same way After Effects does it, you can't, and this doesn't make sense.
If you never encountered this issue or don't care about it, then fine it doesn't apply to your workflow, but for some of us it does, and it is really weird that AE would offer that and they took that feature out for AME. The point os AME is to free AE so you can keep working while you render... And this is not a technical limitation, just poor coordination in the coding department.

Hi there, I'm having exact same issue - no disrespect to Dave but he's just not understood the problem and this question is most definitely not answered.

I'm at a clients office and the setup is CC 2019 (and there I was thinking I was being a smarty pants rendering to PNG instead of a complete movie.... FACEPALM)

I'm facing the same issue. I'm rendering using AME (as I think adobe wants me to).

Simply setting the name to frame.0123.exr instead of frame..exr should result in starting the naming at 0123 in my opinion.

I thought of a work around this issue, save the sequence to a different folder and use a batch naming program to rename the frame numbers. Just google batch rename files and you will find many ways to do it. 
After you've properly named them move them back to the original sequence and replace the old frames.

Great, so by the time I post, AME still can't do it. By reading thru the whole post, I reckon Dave didn't get it...It's such a pain in the arse. Is it such a difficult task to implement such a simple feature into AME?

Anyways, what I usually end up doing is to batch rename those sequence images in Bridge, which has a simple and straightforward batch renaming command.