Adobe Premiere 26.0 is constantly freezing and crashing on my iMac Intel

I’m running into serious issues with my Adobe Premiere workflow, and can’t seem to find any solutions for it.

Whenever I work on anything in Adobe Premiere Pro on my iMac, after a while I’ll suddenly get the spinning wheel of death and my computer will freeze. The spinning wheel will eventually disappear after 4-5 minutes, but the computer will remain frozen and eventually shut down after another 4-5 minutes.

No specific action seems to prompt this, nor does it occur after any specific span of time. It appears completely random when the crash occurs. This happens with multiple projects of varying length (files sizes are between 268 KB and 1.9 MB.

The system I’m running on:

iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020
Processor: 3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7
Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB
Memory: 40 GB 2133 MHz DDR4
Startup Disk: Macintosh HD
macOS: Sonoma 14.6.1
Storage Space: 572.63 GB available of 1 TB.

I started encountering this when working on Adobe 2024, and upgraded to the latest version, 26.5.1. After I kept encountering the issue, I downgraded to 26.0, but the problem has persisted.

I am not having any other issues with the iMac; everything else operates smoothly.

I have attempted all of the following, but none of them have fixed the issue:

• Clearing media cache
• Confirmed RAM settings are optimized (12GB currently reserved for Premiere)

This has become a serious blocker with my workflow - if anyone can please provide any help or insight I would seriously appreciate it.