[Robert MacDonald] “When rendering video obviously everything slows down and I can’t edit another project as Premiere Pro and Media Encoder are working together.”
When you say rendering, do you mean exporting? They’re two different things in Premiere Pro. Rendering your timeline provides smoother playback. Exporting is for producing a video file in a specific format of your choosing. When exporting, if you select “Queue” instead of “Export” that opens Media Encoder which takes over the process and frees up Premiere Pro to allow you to continue editing.

HTH
Gary