Premiere Pro comes to a crawl trying to work on 10 days of footage

Hello,

This is what I'm trying to do, I have about 10 days worth of footage, 25 files, 162GB at 1280x720 resolution. I'm not sure what the problem is, my video files are in .m4v, I've tried encoding them differently with Adobe Media Encoder, but I'm not sure what is the most optimized video format I should be using?

This is the problem, as soon as I start importing the videos into Premiere Pro, PP will come to a crawl and start consuming all my RAM. I have 32GB of RAM. After awhile it will calm down, but as soon as I start adding to the timeline or try doing anything, RAM usage spikes to 99% again. Making it impossible to do anything.

This has been a very frustrating experience. Can someone shed some light on what I maybe doing wrong?

My goal is to condense all this footage into <5-10 minutes. It's our gym floor being sanded and repainted. I think it will make a very cool video, but I've been struggling!