FAQ: Basic Troubleshooting & Maintenance for Premiere Pro on macOS

[Kevin-Monahan]

Here are my personal recommendations to begin troubleshooting your Premiere Pro installation on macOS.

Executive Summary: Troubleshooting Premiere Pro

• Is your media on a high speed drive that is separate from your macOS drive?
• Trashed media cache?
  • 2020: FAQ: How to clean (delete or trash) media cache files?  
  • 2019: FAQ: How to clean (delete or trash) media cache files?
• Trashed preferences? FAQ: How to reset (trash) preferences in Premiere Pro?
• Tried the same media in a brand new project?
• Tested with a different User account?
• Reset R/W permissions for Adobe folders? Premiere Pro CC, CC 2014, or 2014.1 freezing on startup or crashing while working (Mac OS X 10.9, an...
• Imported older project into blank new project?
• Run Disk Utility > First Aid on all drives?

Details of Troubleshooting and Maintaining a Premiere Pro NLE workstation on macOS

These routine maintenance steps can help prevent issues on macOS:

• Premiere Pro maintenance: trash media cache and prefs on a regular basis.
  • Trash media cache, as it can become corrupt—especially when used in an updated project.
    • It's best to delete, then recreate a project's media cache after updating to new versions.
    • You can delete unused media cache from Preferences > Media Cache.
    • You can also follow the above FAQ to do a full deletion of Media Cache, which I like to do.
  • If your system is behaving in an unexpected manner, your preferences may be corrupt. Reset preferences as a general troubleshooting step.

• System related:
  • Make sure Adobe folder permissions are set or reset to R/W periodically, all Adobe folders (or anything Premiere Pro touches) might be subject to this anomaly, even folders containing media.
    • Among other folders, don't forget to reset Adobe folder permissions after every major new version of either Premiere Pro or macOS as part of routine maintenance.
    • The preferences folder is sometimes accidentally reset to Read Only permissions, rather than Read/Write. Reset the folder to Read/Write to restore functionality.
    • Read only folder permissions can be a source of unexpected crashing and general instability.
    • It is very important to maintain Adobe folder permissions for your macOS system and your own sanity. Make it a habit.
  • Media Drives:
    • Make sure your media lies on a high speed drive connected via a high speed connection (USB 3 or Thunderbolt) that is separate from your macOS drive. This offloads a lot of processing within your system and provides better performance.
    • Run a scheduled cleaning of all media and OS drives using Disk Utility > First Aid
      • Monthly should do.
    • Consider the age, health, and maintenance record of your media drives.
      • Are they ready to be replaced or not?
  • User Account:
    • You can have multiple user accounts on macOS.
    • From time to time the user account you are using may conflict with Premiere Pro.
    • If all other troubleshooting steps have failed, create a new user account and try to launch Premiere Pro from there.
  • Hardware:
    • Attached hardware:
      • Hardware attached to your computer can sometimes conflict with Premiere Pro running macOS.
      • As a troubleshooting step, you can try unplugging all attached external hardware.
      • Update any drivers for this hardware to ensure they are current.
      • Plug things back in one at a time, testing each time after enabling the device.
      • Make sure attached speakers are detected and enabled in Audio Hardware Preferences.
      • Make sure all external hard drives have ample space available for creating proxies, transcodes, and exports.
      • Make sure the fastest drives possible are available for all functions, especially media cache. Look to SSDs and NVMe drives for this purpose.
      • Make sure high speed drives are connected via Thunderbolt 2 or 3 (whichever Mac allows, Thunderbolt 3 being the higher speed option).
    • Internal Hardware:
      • Make sure macOS is updated to ensure you have the latest video drivers
      • Make sure that Audio Hardware is properly enabled in Preferences > Audio Hardware.
      • Make sure all internal hard drives have ample space available for saving project files, saving Auto Save versions of project files, etc. 
      • Install a separate high speed drive for placing media cache files, if possible. SSDs and NVMe drives are popular for this purpose.
• Project related maintenance:
  • Project Health:
    • Corruption:
      • Projects can become corrupt for various reasons.
        • This is the reason you need a good plan for creating and storing back up projects.
      • Guard against any possible problems that could arise.
        • Avoid updating project files from one version to the next.
        • If possible, remain on the same version of Premiere Pro that the project was started in.
        • Not possible?
          • Consider running both available versions side by side.
          • Consider installing a separate boot drive to your computer with a separate OS and Premeire Pro version.
          • Otherwise, create a new project. Import the older project into a blank new project.
    • Back Ups
      • Make sure you have a folder of recent and healthy backup project files
        • Test them periodically.
        • Store a copy of the archive offsite.
        • Create new saved copies using the "Save As" command to save back up projects in your own archive.
        • Make sure Auto Save in Preferences > Auto Save is enabled.
        • Make sure Auto Save in Preferences > Auto Save > Save backup projects to Creative Cloud is enabled.

Hope these tips help in troubleshooting and maintaining your Premiere Pro installation on macOS.

[Michael Grenadier]

Thanks, these are great suggestions.  Here's something you might consider adding to your FAQ.  I provide support for a number of clients who work in Premiere and it's amazing how many ignore this sort of thing. 

Make sure you have sufficient free hard space on all your drives.  From what I've read, keep at least 20% free space on your startup drive and 10% on all other drives.  Unless you have a utility that monitors free drive space, you should check this on a regular basis.  It's very easy for some app to be saving large files to an unexpected location...

[Kevin-Monahan]

Please give me any feedback on this doc. Love to hear from those that need more help.

Thanks,
Kevin