Premiere never co-operating

Question

I don’t know what to do with this issue anymore, I have tried everything. I’ve messed around with scratch disks, caches, preferences, uninstalling and reinstalling, and Premiere is still so difficult to get a project done in. I’m a full time editor and rely on this program to work but most days now I have some kind of issue with exporting. Sometimes it’s completely fine, but usually when I’m really tight for time with a deadline it suddenly stops exporting anything. In Premiere it’s stuck on 0% and when I try to send it to Media Encoder, it can’t even do that. I’m at the point where I feel like I need a 1 to 1 with someone high up in Adobe because no-one seems to have the same issue and i’m sure my clients are beginning to think I’m just trying not to complete my work.

Ocassionally, it will actually export and I’ll have watched my video back 100 times but then watching back the version Premiere exported, I find it has glitches or something’s just a black screen or there’s a black rectangle somewhere, it’s so unreliable and makes my work very unprofessional and slow.

I am so close to leaving Adobe behind but everything I’ve learnt is in Adobe.

Before anyone asks what’s going on with my premiere timeline, it doesn’t matter. There can be nests, there can be effects or there can be hardly anything at all and it’s still temperamental. I’m not using dynamic links. And it happens no matter what export settings I have.

I’m on an Apple M3 Max, 48GB, using Sequoia 15.3.2 and version 26.3.0 of Premiere Pro.

PaulMurphy · Answer

It sounds like you have a bottleneck somewhere in your export.

In between deadlines, run a few tests using one of the problematic projects or sequences to help pinpoint where it's occurring:

Create a new sequence in your project, add only Bars and Tone, and export that. This confirms whether exporting works at all outside your current timeline.
Switch your export codec to something less CPU-heavy, such as ProRes or DNxHD.
Take all your media offline and export with just the offline media warning visible. This rules out whether the issue is media- or drive-related.
Mute all the audio tracks in your main sequence and your nested sequences, then export.
Export a single track of your sequence. If that works, add another track and export again. This helps narrow down whether specific media is the cause.
Export one minute of your timeline instead of all of it (delete the rest of the timeline, don't use In/Out points).

If any one of these exports noticeably better, it helps indicate where the problem lives. The goal isn't to try random fixes until the issue disappears (like clearing caches and resetting preferences). It's to isolate exactly what's causing it.

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