Participant

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

Forum|Forum|1 day ago
September 28, 2026
3 replies
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Premiere Pro – “Error retrieving frame / Frame substitution recursion” causing severe stalls with Nikon ZR N-RAW

I’m experiencing a persistent frame decoding issue in Premiere Pro with Nikon ZR N-RAW (.NEV), mainly 4K 50p.

Premiere repeatedly reports:

Error retrieving frame [number] at time [timecode] from the file ZR1_xxxx.NEV, substituting frame [number].

Followed by:

Frame substitution recursion attempt aborting after multiple attempts.

This happens across many different clips and frames.

The most noticeable behavior is that Premiere is actually extremely fast between the errors. Timeline scrubbing is perfectly smooth, then an error occurs and Premiere completely stalls for approximately 1–2 seconds. After that it suddenly recovers and scrubbing is fast again until the next error.

Exactly the same happens during export: the export runs very fast, suddenly the percentage completely stops for a few seconds, then it continues at full speed again. This repeats throughout the export and makes the total export time extremely slow.

It looks like a repeated decode → stall → recover → decode → stall → recover cycle.

I have reproduced this across:

Premiere Pro 25.x
Premiere Pro 26.x
Premiere Pro 26.5.1 Build 1 (latest)
Multiple macOS versions, including older versions and macOS 17, 18, 20, and latest Golden gate 27
MacBook Pro m2 pro
Mac mini m1
Brand-new Mac Studio m5 max
Multiple different external SSDs (mutiple brands)
Multiple original Nikon ZR .NEV files
Brand-new Premiere projects
Brand-new Mac/Premiere installation
No third-party Premiere plugins
No existing preview/render files
Latest Nikon ZR firmware
High Quality Playback disabled

The behavior remains essentially identical across all these systems and versions.

Because performance is excellent between the errors, and because I can reproduce the same issue across different Macs, macOS versions, Premiere versions and SSDs, this does not appear to be a general CPU/GPU or storage performance issue. It appears that Premiere’s decoding/frame-retrieval pipeline temporarily stalls whenever it fails to retrieve a frame.

This is a serious issue for a professional workflow because it makes both editing and especially exporting unnecessarily slow and unreliable.

Adobe, could this please be investigated by the Premiere engineering team?

KatieToo

Community Manager

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

G

gifted_guide213bAuthor

Participant

Uploaded! Good to know: the issue stated above is with all .NEV (n-raw) files, I tested multiple camera’s, different files sizes en resolutions, all seem to do the exact same thing. I also noticed in the project windows it has a really hard time to show the thumbnails. And then all out of nowhere it loads all the thumbnails at once, but some stay black. Unless you click on them, then it freezes, but then it loads the thumbnail. I think this also has something to do with the decode → stall → recover → decode → stall → recover cycle.

KatieToo

Community Manager

@gifted_guide213b Thank you for the sample files. Our team did some testing on a few different mac setups trying to recreate this issue, but could not. All clips were playing as expected across the board.

I see too you’ve added that this is happening now across multiple cameras and different resolutions, along with it occurring on many types of Macs, in different version Premieres, etc. so this is a long persistent issue so trying to figure out what, if anything, is common between.

Do you recall any major changes right before this latest time of it happening? That could be a computer update, premiere update, drivers, or something else?

To help narrow it down, for now at least, I’m thinking in terms of when you’re using the latest v26.5.1 on your most currently used Mac setup.

I can’t help wondering what your storage setup is like to help understand better. Can you give us some details about this? I see SSD’s mentioned so far, and what kind of cables do you have, is internal or if they’re external such as USB-C for example?

Also, if you were to even test placing one or two clips on your Desktop and test it again, do you see any improvement and does it stop needing to stall at all?

Perhaps too if you’re able, using the same Dropbox link I’ve already sent, can you send us a screen recording of when this is happening so they can see exactly what might be happening?

Thanks!
Katie

Premiere Pro – “Error retrieving frame / Frame substitution recursion” causing severe stalls with Nikon ZR N-RAW

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