Lance — thanks for the suggestion.
Before the update, sending sequences from Premiere to AME (using the Queue button during Export) resulted in encodes identical (or near-enough) to encodes processed directly out of PP.
Since PP passes the “Maximum Render Quality” and bit depth selections automatically to AME during the queue, these selections shouldn’t make the differences between these AME and PP encodes as drastic as they are.
In my case, I had not checked either box originally. I tried it after your suggestion, and while the AME encodes were a tiny bit better, they were still far inferior to the encodes straight out of PP (with the same settings).
still scratching my head,
Greg