Premiere Pro Slow with Red Giant Universe and Audio Clips Going Mute

Hey guys!  Im very new to Premiere Pro.  So, please forgive any naivete on my part.  But, I'm experiencing the following:

- Extremely slow render times, playback and general program slowness any time I employ Red Giant Universe Plugins

- Also slowness (near crashing) when I use "transform"

- Upon closing and reopening Timeline I'm finding audio attached to Red video files going suddenly blank.  Clips are in place, but dead.

I am working with Red 4k and 5k footage, as well as Sony as7ii 4k footage.  Project sequences in 1080.

Any tips on improving this speed?

System:

GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (Driver 416.81)

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10GHz 2.10 GHz (2 Processors)

63.88 GB RAM

64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Thank you!