Adobe Media Encoder appears to leave behind large temporary “Adobe Premiere Pro Audio Previews” folders on macOS after queued exports, eventually consuming over 100 GB of disk space until manually removed.

Description

System

• MacBook Pro 14” (Apple M1 Pro, 16 GB RAM)
• macOS Tahoe 26.x
• Adobe Premiere Pro 2026
• Adobe Media Encoder 2026

Workflow

I exported approximately 30 H.264 videos from a single Premiere Pro sequence by sending them to Adobe Media Encoder. This is my normal workflow for exporting multiple clips from one timeline.

The queue contained a mixture of:

• Completed exports
• Failed exports
• Manually stopped exports
• Skipped exports (to pause the remaining queue)

Observed behaviour

During the export process, Adobe Media Encoder/Premiere created temporary folders under:

/private/var/folders/.../T/Adobe Premiere Pro Audio Previews/

This folder eventually grew to approximately 110 GB and contained many folders such as:

• Luna Sol_20.PRV
• Luna Sol_21.PRV
• Luna Sol_22.PRV
• …
• Luna Sol_34.PRV

Each folder was approximately 7.9 GB.

After the queue was no longer running and both Premiere Pro and Media Encoder were completely closed, these temporary folders remained on disk instead of being automatically removed.

The files were no longer in use (lsof showed no open handles), but they continued occupying over 100 GB of storage.

Investigation

To verify the issue, I investigated using macOS Terminal.

I confirmed that:

• The storage usage came from the temporary “Adobe Premiere Pro Audio Previews” folder.
• No Adobe processes were using the files after Premiere Pro and Media Encoder were closed.
• Manually deleting the folder removed the temporary preview data.
• macOS initially retained the freed blocks because of local Time Machine snapshots (expected macOS behaviour). After thinning those snapshots, approximately 155 GB of storage was immediately recovered.

This suggests the temporary preview folders were not cleaned up automatically after the export workflow had finished.

Expected behaviour

Temporary preview folders created for Media Encoder export jobs should be automatically removed once they are no longer required.

If this behaviour is expected, documentation explaining when these temporary folders are cleaned up would be helpful.

If not, I hope this report helps identify a potential cleanup issue after large queued exports.