MEDIA ENCODER HUNDREDS OF COPIES WHEN Ai to JPG

I typically only use Media Encoder from within Premiere and was not familiar with your issue, so I opened Media Encoder by itself, imported a .jpg still image and then tried to export as .jpg and got the same result as yourself!

What is happening is that Media Encoder is used to working with video, and when the user chooses a still image format for Export, ME assumes that an Image Sequence is desired, meaning every frame of the source video is exported as a separate still image. When you import your still image into ME, you will see it is assigned a default duration of 5.00 seconds, which at 30fps for video would give you 150 still frames when you export! Silly, but that's what it does.

Here is the fix - when you add your image to the Queue and select JPEG as the output preset, click the mouse on the JPEG Sequence (Match Source) in Preset column. On next screen, uncheck where it says Export as Sequence.

Now export and you will get a single frame rather than the entire 5-second sequence of stills. At top of the Export Settings window, to the right of Preset: Custom, you can SAVE the (single-frame export) preset you created for later use.

Thanks

Jeff