Is there a fix for an old Premiere Pro project getting so slow it's almost unusable?

Question

Riddle me this Adobe Community...I began a massive documentary project in 2016. Every year or so, I would do the old "open a fresh project and import the old one into it." Everything hummed along fine for years. The project was once housed on a wonderful Pegasus drive, and was later transferred to a faster G Raid Shuttle. Last year, the gears began to grind HARD.- Opening this project takes about ten minutes.- Saving takes almost a solid minute.- Despite the sequences being HD on a Mac Studio, there is a bit of a lag when hitting play. - The absolute worst, time sucking, "pull your hair out" issue is exporting. It can take 5 minutes just to get the export window to open. Sometimes the export window doesn't open at all. I've done it, and then some. Refreshed the project, cleaned media cache, rewriteen the audio pek files several times, reinstalled Premiere Pro, hunted around for specific clips that cause hiccups to rule out corrupt media, on and on. But the project is basically unusable at this point. Has anyone out there ever had this issue, and managed to get an old project up and running at full speed again?

Stan Jones · Answer

@JesseSchluntz,

> I've done it, and then some.

I don't have an answer, but there's a lot you don't say (and that you've surely done), so I'll add a couple thoughts.

For me a primary question would be the size of the project file and what's in it. For example, use of warp stabilizer which stores the results in the project file.

"Last year" makes me wonder about things like the introduction of Media intelligence/indexing that was introduced in 25.2 (April? 2025), and could take some time to index all your media. You can turn it off in preferences before you open your project. It only happens once. You can open the Progress panel to see what is still happening.

There are quite a few obsolete effects; do any of them slow your system down? I don't know the answer.

Transcriptions/captions/text generally? Some users found mind-numbing slowdowns.

I am not using productions, but intuitively I like Neil's suggestion. My old projects are not that big, but it is hard to get rid of much content if I want to keep them active to work on again.

Stan

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