Premiere suddenly became unusable — memory pressure instantly spikes to red just opening one project, then crash / force quit

I’d go through the reset options, but probably start with disabling third-party effects.

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere/desktop/troubleshooting/preferences-and-settings-issues/reset-preferences-at-launch.html

UPDATE: After about a half dozen reboots, and a LOT of patiently waiting in idle once opening the project, it seems Premiere has worked out whatever the issue was on its own, I am happy to report. Still quite curious what might have prompted this in the first place and what steps I could take to prevent such a thing ocurring again. Im very grateful to be back in my project, no doubt about! However I did lose almost 2 hours today until whatever the bug was resolved itself. Thanks folks!

Hoping someone can help me diagnose this because I’m suddenly dead in the water on an important project.

Premiere had been feeling increasingly sluggish over the last few days, but now it has escalated to the point where the project is basically unusable.

Here’s exactly what’s happening:

• I reboot the Mac fresh

• No other meaningful programs running

• Open only Premiere

• Open this one project

• I do literally nothing — don’t touch timeline, don’t scrub, don’t hit play, don’t open sequences

• Within moments, memory pressure goes from green → yellow → red

• Premiere memory usage climbs absurdly high (I captured it at 105 GB)

• Swap shoots up massively

• Premiere then crashes, or the whole app becomes unresponsive and macOS shows it as “Paused” in Force Quit

If I actually try to edit, it gets worse even faster.

Important detail: the moment I quit Premiere, the system immediately returns to normal memory behavior, so this appears isolated to Premiere / this project.

What I’m seeing in Activity Monitor:

• Premiere hit 105.34 GB memory

• Physical RAM is 24 GB

• Swap climbed above 18 GB

• Memory pressure deep red

Then after quitting Premiere:

• Memory drops back to ~4.5 GB total system usage

• Pressure returns green immediately

Additional clue:

I also noticed VTDecoderXPCService active while this is happening, so maybe codec / hardware decode related?

Current questions:

• Does this sound like a corrupt project file?

• Corrupt sequence?

• Bad media cache?

• Hardware decode issue?

• One problematic clip causing runaway allocation?

• Multicam / nested sequence issue?

Context:

This project contains multicam work and mixed media, and Premiere had been progressively slowing down before reaching this point.

At this stage I’m basically locked out: I can technically open the project, but it immediately starts eating memory until it dies.

Would really appreciate any serious troubleshooting ideas, especially from anyone who has seen memory usage explode like this before.