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Raddles
Raddles
Known Participant
September 15, 2026

Premiere is randomly deactivating playback on certain sequences, even with no intensive effects or processing.

  • September 15, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 35 views

I’m running Premiere Pro 26.5.0 on a 2025 Mac Studio running projects from an external Thunderbolt 3 OWC Raid 0. my soundcard is an UAD Apollo x8 Gen 2.

Since upgrading to this version of Premiere, I’ve found it quite randomly unstable, particularly with this issue. 

 

My current example is just working from a sequence with only 24bit wave file clips that I’m playing through for language translation purposes. There’s no editing involved here just playback. At a certain point the wheel of death spontaneously appeared and the whole sequence in the timeline now cannot be played at all either as a source or program timeline. In fact, as I try to isolate the issue now  Premiere pro itself will not playback any clips at all and the whole program intermittently freezes. A program close and re-open will not fix the issue so I have to restart

      2 replies

      Amy the Stuv
      Community Manager
      Amy the StuvCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      September 15, 2026

      Hi again, ​@Raddles!

      Sorry you’re facing this issue. Freezes and crashes are terrible.

      Does this happen in a brand new project with freshly imported clips? Are you able to hold down shift as you launch and clear your Media Cache? Does this help? 

      If this doesn’t work, we would appreciate something called a Sample file from Mac that will tell us what processes are happening during the freeze or hang, so if you get the spinning wheel of death again, we would appreciate if you could generate one for us. Instructions are below, I can DM you a private upload link.

      MAC sample file:

      1. Open Activity Monitor and identify the Premiere process (you can use search to filter for only Premiere)
      2. In Premiere, get it into the hanging/unresponsive state
      3. Switch back to Activity Monitor and right click on Premiere then choose > Create Sample
      4. Click Save, then save it as a text file somewhere.
      5. Then, you can DM me and either provide us the link/access to this file or I can send you a link to upload that file, whatever's easiest.

      Lastly, I might try to move the 26.0 folder out of Documents → Adobe → Premiere Pro and see if you can launch and play the timeline. If you can, you’ll need to add back your Keyboard and Layouts folders from the Profile-[ComputerUsername] folder, and of course your projects if they were stored there. Do this when Premiere is closed and then re-open.

      Knowing what M chip or CPU / GPU you have on your Mac would be useful for this too. Was 2025 the M4 series? Are you on Tahoe 26.6.2 OS?

       

      Hoping to help,

      Amy

      Raddles
      RaddlesAuthor
      Known Participant
      September 17, 2026

      Thanks again fro these suggestions Amy.

      I’ll wait for this issue to arise again and try this diagnostic process you’ve offered to understand the issue, and report back

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