Premiere crashes when reloading media cache files

[DinosaurPizza]

Bolded the most relevant parts for skim reading.

I've been working on this longform video essay for 3+ months. I have some 500+GB of video files within the premiere file. The video is roughly 90 minutes long already with another 60+ minutes to go in terms of editing. I've been working on this specific premiere file for about 2 months and haven't had issues.

Today, Premiere crashed once I loaded the file. I can open Premiere just fine and get the hub of all my available projects. It doesn't appear the app is the problem. I can open other projects. But if I open this large project then it displays "Media Unavailable." This is common for starting big projects like this, but the media is never recovered and the program never responds. If you click anything it stops responding and I have to end the process through task manager.

Other threads have recommended restarting in safe mode and clearing the media cache. Clearing the media cache allows me to open the project within premiere. In the bottom right-hand corner I can see it "generating peak file for XXX," which makes the program slow but it works. However, at some point in the generation of peaks the program becomes unresponsive and crashes again.

I haven't included any new video files in weeks. I've worked on this for 15-20 hours in that time. This isn't the result of a new file corrupting everything or anything like that.

Has anyone run into this problem? It was difficult to google the exact circumstances so I apologize if this is a repeat. If this video file is unrecoverable I might cry. I've worked for so long on this to now reach a bunch of technical problems.

[DinosaurPizza]

Aditionally:

• I have reset preferences
• I have switched playback to "software only"
• I have manually deleted cache files by navigating to user>[username]>appdata>roaming>adobe>common>media cache and media cache files.
• I have reinstalled Adobe Premiere
• I have restarted my computer
• I have restarted my computer, reinstalled adobe premiere, and restarted my computer again
• I have looked at the "generating peak files" and clicked the app each time a new one finished loading, it does not appear to be a specific file.

[Bryce29282668vnph]

Dinosaur, did you ever find a fix?  I'm running into this exact issue and have tried all the exact fixes you did.  

[R Neil Haugen]

Everyone working in large long-form or episodic projects should be using Productions mode. NOT the old-style stand-alone single project method!

That is actually "the fix" for this and other issues when working massive projects with tons of assets, sequences, and all that comes with that.

The Productions mode is a very different workflow to start with, but is vastly better for large work: more stable, better playback ... all of that ...

Premiere Pro Productions Introduction

Using Productions in Premiere Pro

Adobe Long-form and Episodic Best Practices Guide 

Jarle’s blog expansion of the pdf Multicam section: Premiere Pro Multicam

[DinosaurPizza]

@Bryce29282668vnphNo. The follow-up from @R Neil Haugen suggests this is a known problem for large files and the realistic answer is: Premiere is never reliably going to handle large projects like the one I described.

What I ended up doing was installing an older version of Premiere and exporting the file to load into a new project as a video file. The oldest version available to me which was like barely 7 versions earlier (so if we are hypothetically on 10.7, I could install version 10.0) but it allowed me to load the project without issue at first. I exported the whole thing initially just to be safe. Then I tried working within this older version like normal, but it soon started to crash the same way it did before.

Generally, I am counting my blessings I was at the end of the project. It doesn't sound like there is a solution, there's just workarounds and ways to prevent that from happening again.

[R Neil Haugen]

Premiere handles massive projects, as long as you use the correct form ... Productions.

That is designed to work with thousands of assets, many hours of footage, and not bog down. It's what they use with their "Hollywood" division on long-form and episodic work.