Serious “Error retrieving frame / Frame substitution recursion” issue in Premiere Pro with Nikon ZR N-RAW

Hi Katie,

I’ve also uploaded one additional screen recording to the Dropbox showing a complete walkthrough from starting Premiere and opening a relatively simple project. The edit only has some basic Lumetri color grading and simple edits — nothing particularly heavy or effect-intensive.

The recording clearly shows the issue developing: thumbnails disappear or fail to load, black frames appear (sometimes frame 0), Media Pending appears, and eventually Premiere stops displaying the footage correctly and freezes.

At that point, simply closing the project often isn’t enough. I have to completely quit Premiere with Command+Q and restart it. At the moment, I’m having to do this roughly every 5–15 minutes while editing.

What’s especially noticeable in the recording is that the Mac itself is clearly fast enough: I can scrub through the N-RAW footage extremely quickly, even at full playback quality with Lumetri grading applied, and playback is very responsive. The performance itself is excellent.

The problem is that after working/scrubbing for a while, Premiere seems to lose the ability to properly retrieve/display the media, eventually resulting in Media Pending, freezes and requiring a complete Premiere restart.

Please see the Dropbox for the full screen recording.

Hi Katie,

Thanks again for continuing to investigate this and for filing the report. I’ve done more testing and uploaded additional material to the same Dropbox. A few observations may be important for engineering:

1. The issue is not tied to a specific clip or frame

I have over 5,000 Nikon ZR N-RAW/NEV clips from many different shoots, projects and cameras, and I can reproduce this behavior across essentially all of them.

The problematic clip/frame is also completely random. Premiere may stall on one clip/frame, but after restarting Premiere it can happen on a completely different clip or frame. Even projects with footage shot back in December 2025 show the same behavior.

So unfortunately I cannot provide one specific timecode that always fails. This appears to be an intermittent decoding issue, rather than corruption of a particular frame or file.

2. The number of NEV files loaded may be relevant

I noticed something new while testing Premiere Pro 26.0 on my Mac Studio M5 Max (64 GB).

If I import only one or two .NEV clips, Premiere can sometimes work normally. But when I import a larger folder, for example around 100 NEV files, the problems start appearing: random clips produce frame retrieval errors, frames drop, thumbnails stay black, timelines become unresponsive and Premiere temporarily freezes.

This may explain why testing only a few of my sample files did not reproduce the issue on your systems.

I’ve therefore uploaded additional NEV footage and an affected Premiere Pro 26.0 project. Could engineering please try again using all/a larger number of the NEV files together, rather than testing only individual clips?

3. Activity Monitor + additional material uploaded

I’ve uploaded an Activity Monitor Sample captured during a freeze, additional N-RAW footage from different Nikon ZR cameras, the affected Premiere 26.0 project, and the previous screen recordings.

The screen recordings show the same recurring pattern:

decode normally → stall/freeze → recover → continue normally

This happens during scrubbing, playback, thumbnail generation and exporting.

4. Other editors can reproduce it

At least three colleagues experience the same behavior on their Macs.

One confirmed setup is:

• Mac mini (2023), M2
• macOS Sonoma 14.4
• Premiere Pro 26.5.2

Another colleague uses a MacBook Pro with an M5 chip and experiences the same issue. They have also seen it in older Premiere versions since NEV support was introduced.

5. Storage has been thoroughly ruled out

I have reproduced this using multiple external SSDs and even an 18 TB Seagate HDD. More importantly, I disconnected all external drives and USB devices and copied both the project and NEV media to the internal SSD of the M5 Max Mac Studio. The exact same issue still occurs.

One interesting observation with the mechanical HDD: while an affected project was open, the drive was continuously and unusually heavily accessing data. The moment I quit Premiere with Command+Q, that activity stopped immediately. Perhaps Premiere is repeatedly requesting/re-reading or decoding media in the background.

6. This is becoming a serious production problem

At this point, normal editing is becoming extremely difficult. Scrubbing stalls, thumbnails remain black, playback produces frame retrieval/substitution errors, and exports repeatedly freeze for several seconds before suddenly continuing at full speed.

I have now reproduced this in Premiere 25.x, 26.0 and 26.5.x, across multiple Macs, macOS versions, storage devices, cameras, projects and thousands of NEV files.

Going back to an older Premiere version is also not a practical solution because my current projects are already created in the 2026 versions, and going further back introduces Nikon ZR/N-RAW support/compatibility issues.

I hope the larger NEV sample set and affected Premiere 26.0 project help reproduce it. I’d especially recommend testing with many of the supplied NEV files loaded together, since that seems much more likely to trigger the issue than testing only one or two clips.

Thanks again for taking this seriously and passing everything on to engineering.

Hi ​@gifted_guide213b 

Thanks for stopping by the Premiere forums and giving us those thorough details about the frame error/substitution for your Nikon ZR N-RAW clips. Looks like it’s spanning across several versions of Premiere, on different types of Macs and macOS’s.

May we request a sample media clip to perform some testing on our side to see if we can recreate that issue? I can DM you our private Dropbox upload link to make that easier. 

Sorry for any frustrations with this and do hope to help!
Katie