FAQ: Basic Troubleshooting & Maintenance for Premiere Pro on macOS

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, and later)
• 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.