I have CS6 Master Collection on a Windows 7x64 Ultimate HP Z820, 32 GB RAM, Quadro 4000, and have been using it for over a year. I use Premiere Pro and batch Queue to Media Encoder for encoding. The last time I used this workflow for batch was about 130 days ago, and it worked like a charm (like it should). A couple of weeks ago, I was on another project and tried to batch again, just like before, even using some of the same presets (on a 'nothin fancy' timeline) and Pr would create a project file in the TEMP folder after I pressed the Queue button, and AME would launch, and the project would appear in the AME queue. I'd press start, and wait a long time, until finally in the Encorder panel, I'd see "Connecting to Dynamic Link Server...", after several minutes, I'd get the goat, and find an error of "Could not read source file..." in the logs. After verifying the source was indeed there, I decided this was really a dynamic link issue.
Here are a few more data points from things I've tried (also pointing to a dynamic link issue).
(1) Exporting (encoding) directly from Pr works fine (so the headless AME is working)
(2) Importing a Pr Sequence within AME does not work either, I get an error from the Import Premiere Pro Sequence dialog (after a long wait “Connecting to Dynamic Link server…”) that “Connecting to Dynamic Link server failed”.
I do suspect this is a dynamic link issue, but don't know why, or what has changed. I've tried the 'create a new Premiere shortcut in dynamiclink folder' solution found on the forums and Google, but it didn't work. When I first tried that, I did find two shortcuts already there, one for Pr and one for Ae, but BOTH of them pointed to a CS4 folder! I've never owned CS4, and went from CS3 Design Professional to CS6 Master Collection. I also suspect this issue was caused by one of the updates to Pr that occurred within the last 130 days (since the last time I know this functionality worked). I've made not changes to my system during that time.
Kyle suggested that it could be firewall problem blocking the TCP traffic used by dynamic link, but I do not use Windows Firewall, and all of this happens on a single machine, so there should be no TCP traffic across the wire (unless it is communicating with Adobe?). I use Webroot Endpoint Protection, but have received no indication that anything is suspect or has been blocked. Any help from the Adobe engineers would be greatly appreciated.
I'd be willing to assist with troubleshooting on my system, as I've done with Audition in the past, but really don't want to uninstall the suite and go through that again. This should be tracked down by looking at the updates pushed out to CS6 withing the last 130 days. I think there have been two.
Thanks,
Shane