Production constantly crashing when opening a large Project within it

Question

EDIT: problem resolved using workaround, see reply comment.

I'm trying to turn a very large stand-alone Project into a Production, following the helpful guidance from this Adobe Community discussion, as well as page 75 of the Premiere Pro Guide , Jarle Leirpoll Ultimate Guide and Karl Soule's YouTube video. I'm confident in the process and that I'm doing each step correctly. I also updated Premiere to the latest version (25.6.2, Build 1) before I began the process.

The problem is, the Production can't handle the Project. It crashes almost every time. The project still opens just fine (albeit slowly) when I open outside of a Production.

Premiere crashed A LOT as I attempted to bring this Project into the Production (using the 'Add Project to Production..." command). Ironically, the only time it was successful at importing the Project was the time I was doing a screen recording to get a record of it crashing.

I proceeded to disassemble the assests of the Project into new Projects within the Production, as directed in the sources above, "Saving All" regularly. All the footage was removed from the original Project, and split into multiple smaller projects. But I got greedy and tried to move too many Sequences at once into a new Project, and Premiere crashed again. Now I can't re-open that original Project within the Production. All the other (newer, smaller) Projects within the Production open fine. Just the original - it crashes Premiere every time.

~~I did notice that when I was moving assests out of the original project (dragging between panels, with no modifier keys held down), it was duplicating/copying the sequences rather than moving them.~~ [edit: incorrect]

From what I've read I understand that too many Sequences or too-large Sequences in a Project is a problem for Productions, and I suspect it's all the Sequences that remain in the original Project that are causing Premiere to crash when it tries to open it in the Production workflow.

I didn't get to finish moving all the assests out of the original project, but I simply can't open it again (if anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears).
But I'm wondering, could I open that original Project (well, the one that was duplicated into the Production at the start, not the actual original) as a strand-alone, without opening the Production first, and start to delete some of those Sequences that have already been copied out? Then maybe I'll be able to open it in the Production afterwards if there aren't as many Sequences in it? Or will that just corrupt everything???

Adobe Premiere Pro Version 25.6.2 (build 1), zero 3rd party plug-ins

Windows 11, Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 9 285K 3.70 GHz, 128 GB (127 GB usable), 64-bit operating system, NVIDEA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER

braydon · Accepted Answer

I was finally able to re-open the original Project within the Production by using the Windows Snipping Tool screen recorder trick that I stumbled upon previously. I've got no idea why this works, it makes no logical sense as the computer is working even harder when the screen recorder is running. But the Project opened. I was able to move all the sequences out of it, into smaller Projects. Now that the Sequences have been removed, I can open and close that project at will, without needing to use the screen recording workaround (not that I need to anymore), which confirms it was the sheer number of sequences that was playing havoc with the Production.

I was wrong on one aspect. The sequences were indeed being moved from one project to another, but what was happening is that nested clips were being turned into new sequences and were being copied rather than moved. Since I use nested clips a lot, there were a lot of sequences remaining in the original project, which made me think what I thought.

I consider this resolved now, but it highlights the fragility of the Productions workflow when adding existing projects that contain a lot of sequences. No-one should have to go through the endless crashes and frustrations that I went through today, and if I hadn't tried to make a screen recording of the hell I was experiencing, I'd still be at square one!

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