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

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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 everyone! Wanted to provide an update that anyone having this issue occur with RED footage, there is a fix available in v27.1 Beta Premiere build 42 that should be soon available to update.

As soon as your Creative Cloud app has the Beta update for build 42, you can try that out and let us know if that has any improvement with the frame substitution error issues. You can double check the version and build in Beta by going to Help > About Premiere(Beta) or Premiere(Beta) > About Premiere.

If you are still having issues after testing in that build again, reply below and let us know briefly your specs and what you’re seeing exactly, and we’ll have another look.

Hope that helps!
Katie

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Chris31098303zj57

Participant

Hi Katie,

Important update: The exact same issue now also occurs with my brand-new Sony FX5, recording in 16-bit X-OCN RAW (.MXF).

It’s even worse than with Nikon N-RAW. Thumbnails remain black, scrubbing completely freezes, and the error log fills up with dozens of the exact same “Error retrieving frame” and frame substitution errors reported earlier. The footage is practically unplayable and unusable.

I’m using the latest Premiere Pro and macOS on my Mac Studio M5 Max.

This urgently needs to be fixed. We can no longer do our work properly, as footage from multiple professional cameras is now unusable in Premiere Pro. This is seriously affecting our business and ongoing productions.

Please escalate this to the engineering team as a priority.

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KatieToo

Community Manager

@Chris31098303zj57 Thank you for your report, and sorry for the frustrations with all this. I’ve passed this along. They are currently working on a fix, and hopefully soon can provide an update about that.

If you bring in just the X-OCN footage in new Premiere project, without any RED involved, do you experience the same frame sub/errors and similar problems?

How about if you do the same test in the latest 27.1 Beta Premiere? Any better playback on that?

Let us know the results of that, and I’ll pass it onto the engineers.

I did also see that @isaiahsuko passed along a workaround that seemed to work best if you did “render in to out” or “render and replace” if just a few shots with some correction needed. It was recent and below in comments, which I’ll link directly to take you to that comment -->

Let us know also if that workaround helps you in any way in the meantime, and apologies again!
Katie

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isaiahsuko

Participant

Myself and 3 other editors I work with have all been plagued by this exact same problem. Also on a wide range of Macs. Have also tried it on multiple different versions of premiere. It definitely is more common on projects with a large number of .NEV files. I never see it in small projects. On a very large project it seems like there is a near 100% chance of it happening. Current one I’m on the project has become unusable. 1.6tb of footage in the project with 130 .NEV files. Was just on a small project with only 100gb of footage with 12 .NEV files and it worked flawlessly.

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KatieToo

Community Manager

@isaiahsuko Thank you for providing those details and update about when you’ve noticed this issue and how smaller projects with those are working. Still keeping an eye on this ongoing investigation while engineers work on a fix.

Thanks for your post and patience!
Katie

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isaiahsuko

Participant

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but I do have a temporary, but very annoying solve. “Render and Replace” always works. Once I have exported the first time and there are glitched shots in the export I can go back and find those shots in my timeline and render and replace them. However there is always a gamma shift of the replacement ProRes renders which I have to manually compensate for in lumetri color. It’s a very tedious process.

The glitched footage in the timeline and the glitched footage in exports is sometimes different. Shots that appear normal in the timeline will break only when exporting. I don’t think I’ve seen it the other way around.

In my testing it did also seem like there was better chances of a perfect export if “render in to out” had been run before doing a full export. This would require further testing to verify though. I only tested this on a freshly restarted premiere. Without rendering in to out even a freshly restarted premiere was still having glitches.

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KatieToo

Community Manager

@gifted_guide213b Wanted to update you that our team has been able to recreate this issue and are currently working on a fix. We will return to this post and update further, once more details on that become available.

Thanks!
Katie

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gifted_guide213bAuthor

Participating Frequently

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.

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KatieToo

Community Manager

@gifted_guide213b Responding here to both latest replies - thank you for those additional files, the samples during freeze/hang, and screen recording. You’ve also thoroughly answered those questions. It’s very appreciated and helpful. I’ll be adding these to the ongoing report, and that report is linked to this post, so they’ll have access to all your details on these and where issues triggered or returned.

Something caught my eye. You mentioned 5,000 total NEV clips or clips in full, and bringing them in like 100 per folder at a time? Are all these in that one project then or have you had a look at Premiere Productions for possible future workflow, as even past this issue, it may help?

Thanks again for your time and effort reporting on all this, and appreciate your patience as they continue to investigate. I’ll return here if any future questions or needs arise, and we’ll also update about this issue fix.
Katie

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gifted_guide213bAuthor

Participating Frequently

Just to clarify: I did not mean 5,000 NEV clips in a single project. We shoot with the Nikon ZR cameras daily and have done so since N-RAW/.NEV support became available in Premiere Pro. A typical project contains around 50–250 clips. Across our projects, we now have 5,000+ NEV clips on archive which we can reproduce this issue. It happens regardless of the project, clip count, or footage, so Premiere Productions would not solve this.

Unfortunately, it has now become even more serious: we can no longer reliably export. Media Encoder fails, likely when it encounters the same frame retrieval/substitution errors. Exporting directly from Premiere starts normally but then freezes indefinitely at a random percentage. Restarting Premiere and trying again simply causes it to freeze at a different percentage.

This really needs urgent attention. Multiple editors are now effectively unable to do their jobs: editing is extremely unstable, and now we cannot reliably deliver exports either. Transcoding everything to ProRes/proxies every day is simply not a workable solution due to the amount of footage, data, and additional processing time involved.

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gifted_guide213bAuthor

Participating Frequently

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.

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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

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gifted_guide213bAuthor

Participating Frequently

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.

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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

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

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