High spec mac but application keeps crashing and taking hours to export a short video

As of today, playback and exporting videos has become very slow. It's taking me hours just to export a 1-2 minutes video.

I have a M3 Max Macbook with 36Gb of ram. I updated the OS to Tahoe 26.2 and updated premier pro 2026 in my attempts to fix it but no changes. I am using a Shappire Plug in but it hasnt effected performance like this before.

I keep having the 'force quit applications' window pop in which it says Premier Pro is using 140-180GB and is no longer reponsive. 

I have deleted all Caches and 100Gb worth of old saves and premier documents.

Still nothing has worked - any suggestions? Anyone experiencing similiar and found solutions?