Memory Leaks and Hogging on 2017 iMacPro with Premiere Pro v22 – Solutions and help?

Hi 1954 Godzilla is my hero!

I apologize for your issues. I have seen situations similar to this in the past. It sounds like your projects have become corrupt.

SPECS:

2017 iMac Pro on Monterey 12.0.1

3 Ghz-10-Core Intel Xeon W, 64 GB DDR4 RAM, Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB

Premiere Pro v 22.1.2; Media Encoder and After Effects are all latest versions too

Thanks for the specs.

I recently upgraded to Monterey 12.0.1 and Premiere Pro 22.1.2.  

A first red flag is that new issues can crop around updates to macOS, especially when Apple hardware is approaching the 5-year mark. When you come to that age Mac, it may be wiser to "sunset" that machine, lockdown macOS, and wait to upgrade any OS on a newer machine. We have Apple Silicon now entering the macOS realm, an added layer of complexity to macOS. Just an observation. Furthermore, your machine has already reached obsolete status and is no longer being manufactured by Apple.

I used to teach in editing classes that you should not update a project across major versions of Premiere Pro or across an OS update. If these can be avoided with projects in progress, they should be. If they must be, then tread carefully and make sure you have backups of any of that work somewhere off the machine. The simple act of updating projects across a new OS or major project versions can corrupt your projects, which can be disastrous. Sorry to say, it's happened to me before and in other NLEs, as well.

Now as I start editing in the morning, the memory shown in the Activity Monitor for Premiere starts out fine, maybe 3-7 GB, but within 5 minutes, the memory use starts to increase by leaps and bounds.  I can usually keep editing, but playback becomes slow, etc.  It doesn’t matter what project is open––small or large. Happens with any kind of media. 

 

I suspect these projects are corrupt, and I've given you my reasons for why I think they are, sorry to say. As a test, delete media cache, including current media cache, by first choosing File > Close All Projects. From the Home screen, select Pro Premiere > Preferences > Media Cache and delete ALL media cache. Otherwise, the current media cache can bite you. Finally, begin a new project and import some fresh footage into it. Is all going well? If so, then create another new project. Import the contents of the older, poorly functioning projects and see if this "rewiring" of a new project can resurrect your sequences so that you can typically work with them again.

Memory and Real Memory go way up, even to maximum system GB, and the Swapped Used memory goes crazy sky-high to over a gig, sometimes 3GB!  Once or twice, I got the “system out of memory” warning, and the system crashed. 

Try repairing the projects and see if your out-of-memory errors subside. Let me know what happens.

I’ve tried several solutions: deleting cache, resetting prefs, lowering playback quality, reducing project size and assets, importing projects into new ones, setting new scratch disks… the memory building cycle keeps repeating. 

Rats. It sounds like you've already tried some of the things I suggested. Sorry about that. Sometimes, repairing projects is all you can do. If they cannot be fixed, you have to move to a backup project file and redo any work if you need to. Hopefully, you have some autosave versions and can revive those without losing work. Do you have those or any other backup files? If not, I'm afraid you'll probably either have to rebuild the projects and sequences or grind your way through until export and when new projects can be started.

As a final measure, you can take a closer look at your media and workflow. Perhaps it's something with those items that might be ballooning your memory. Do you have excessive effects added? A lot of Warp Stabilizer or Morph Cut transitions? How about still images? Any with super large resolution? Do you have any large video files? 8K or 10-bit HEVC? Since you have Xeon chips, you do not have support for H.264 decoding. If you have HEVC or H.264 files large in frame size, can you convert the footage to a broadcast codec? Any third-party effects or AE comps that can be removed or replaced with a flattened file?

Hope we can help you.

Thanks,
Kevin