Have a bad engine knock?

Hi, so over a year ago I did a timing job and cam phaser swap on my 5.4l v8 3valve triton, it’s been running great ever since. Well about 3 weeks ago I was driving down the road and I turned my ac on and a knocking started. Only on driver side. So when I pulled over, I knew it wasn’t the timing because of the sound! It wasn’t the tick! And it didn’t happen until I turned the air on so it had me thinking maybe ac compressor or something so I got home and I took my belt off and unfortunately the knock was still there. So then I thought maybe a loose spark plug, made sure they were all torqued to 25 ft pounds and nope not the problem so next I went to my vct solenoids and tested to see if they were good and they are. So I crawls under the truck and noticed I had a bad oil leak coming from my oil filter housing, I went and got a felpro gasket replaced it, and tried again, still knocking. So I decided to go ahead and pull my driver side valve cover off. Checked my cam phaser it’s still straight up and down, it’s not cocked out, chains are still tight everything looked good. Check to see if there was any slack in my roller followers and they all felt fine. So I had a buddy listen to it and he thinks I have a vacuum leak somewhere and said it could be a exhaust manifold gasket leak. I’m lost at this point so I figured I’d try this page and see what everyone says. I’m trying to upload some videos and a couple pictures