Premiere Pro 2026 keeps lagging and freezing

Dropped back to 26.0.2 today, and so far I’m not experiencing the lagging problem.

Prior to changing HEVC clips to H264, it would take quite a while to get the Lumetri Scopes panel to come up. After the change, the panel pops right up as it should.

I do have quite a few HEVC clips in the project; the others are H264. I converted all the HEVC to H264 and replaced them on the timeline (a time consuming task), and that may have helped a bit, but it did not eliminate the lagging issue. As always, I wonder how well updates are tested before they’re released. 

I have the same issue with 26.3.2, it lags intolerably during editing (eg, sometimes when shifting clips to the right). I tried deleting all media cache, but that didn’t resolve the problem. This is a major impediment to workflow and needs to be corrected quickly. 

Windows 11 Pro

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 16-Core Processor (3.49 GHz)  64.0 GB Ram

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 (10 GB)

Hello there, Khor Han Sen,

Thanks for the post. Sounds frustrating. I do understand your issue. We can try troubleshooting. Relaunch Premiere and press the Shift key to open the Reset Options dialog box. Delete all media cache from this dialog box. Reopen your project, and new media cache is created. Try now and see if you have better performance. Let us know how it goes.

Thanks,
Kevin