What I ended up doing, which worked pretty well was placing my 17 hours of footage into one sequence.
I then ran through it cutting it into rough 5 minute pieces.
I then ran back through and subclipped everything into a bin.
I then queued each of them into AME with the correct render settings.
and, 12 hours later, the render was finished.
With an addition of sending a bunch of clips or sequences to batch render, that would be amazing. But it didn’t crash. I guarantee putting 225 clips through compressor would have crashed!!!
WAHOO!
-Ben