Hi Stan, thanks for chiming in. Unfortunately the export in Premiere Pro is still at 1% with 27:19:16 time remaining (it's literally not moving). However, I know it isn't "frozen" because I can Cancel the action, move the windows around, etc. Is Adobe Media Encoder (I'm assuming that's what oyu mean by AME) the feature that is baked into Premiere Pro that I'm using now to export this video, or is it something different?
Furthermore, I don't know how to separate the transcoding of timeline assets from the rest of a build. My video has a simple fade in over the first two seconds of the video track and a simple fade out over the last two seconds of the track and is two hours of straight camcorder footage. I don't have "Maximum Render Quality" checked. I'm a total stranger to Adobe Premiere Pro/Encore.