Bad Performance Premiere Pro Intel Mac
The Issue
After every single click in the timeline, I see the beach ball rotating. Premiere is significantly slowed down after every interaction. I press play, and the sound starts but the video starts playing seconds later. I press pause and it takes a few seconds (sometimes up to 15 seconds) to stop the playback. I move a clip from track one to track two and the whole program freezes. The sound keeps on playing, the video often freezes in those situations. When the beach ball stops spinning my mouse still grabs on the clip I clicked on earlier without me pressing the button anymore. I could go on and on.
I use Premiere Pro professionally. I am trying to work as sustainable as possible in an industry that is highly dependent on technology. So please do not recommend updating my machine. It is 4 years old and we shouldn't be forced to update that frequently. Still using mostly the same camera as I did four years ago and it was running all fine until 3-4 months ago. Since then it has been a constant downfall. My business is currently suffering because of the performance of my machine and Premiere.
Lightroom Classic, Photoshop 23, 24, and beta are all running fine. Same for Final Cut. The problem is more or less exclusive to Premiere Pro.
What I tried so far:
- Reinstalling Premiere
- Reinstalling Adobe programs and the Creative Cloud app altogether
- Updating Premiere to the latest version
- Updating Mac OS to the latest version
- Reinstalling a clean version of Mac OS
- Using different external SSDs for editing
- Keeping original files on a separate hard drive - only having proxies on editing ssd
- Deleting Cache Files
- Changing Cache Location to sit on Editing SSD
- Buying a new SSD
- Assigning maximum possible RAM to Premiere
- Closing every other window except Premiere (and sometimes Media Encoder if currently in use)
- Closing unnecessary windows within Premiere (Lumetri Color, Audio Effects, etc.)
- Using external Apps to identify problems with other apps or unnecessary memory usage
Specs
I use an iMac with the following specs:
3,6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB
40 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
253,82 GB of memory available on internal SSD (512 GB)
Currently running Mac OS Ventura - Was running Big Sur until a few hours ago. The problem was the same.
Workflow
I exclusively edit with proxies. Low- or Medium-Res Pro-Res Proxies.
I never work with timelines with more than 2 video tracks with footage. All unnecessary layers (text, headlines, etc.) are constantly turned off unless I work on this specific layer. No color grades before my timeline reaches picture lock status.
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