Premiere Pro freezing during editing/moving/cropping footage

[Genevieve B.]

Lately, Premiere Pro has been frequently freezing on one of my projects. When I move/drag clips, crop them, or enlarge them, my screen will stop responding and become greyed out for at least a minute. (The shortest lags are for 20-30 seconds, but they can be longer than five minutes). While I have a lot of clips stashed in the project library, the actual timeline has less than five minutes of audio and video, so that should not be causing the issue. It got to a point where it took three hours for me to edit just a few seconds of footage. I tried importing the files into a new project, but it froze and crashed. So, I restarted Premiere Pro, clearing the entire media cache and resetting the preferences. It seemed to help a little bit, but it is still having issues. 

My computer is only six months old, and I don't have a lot of programs running in the background. My other projects seem to do fine, although since I'm not currently working on them, they do not have as many clips. My university's WiFi is a bit slow, but Premiere Pro used to work just fine on my old computer last year. 

Should I try importing the project again? Or should I just uninstall and reinstall Premiere Pro? 

[Genevieve B.]

Update: I tried to import the files into another project, which just made it worse. Then, I uninstalled and re-installed Premiere Pro. When I reopened the project, it did fine until about 5 minutes into editing. Then, it froze when I tried to trim the edges of a clip. It also lags when I move clips around or copy and paste them, but the cropping is the worst. The clips I'm manipulating are a few seconds long or less, so they shouldn't be causing Premiere Pro any trouble. I also have my playback resolution set to 1/4. 

I don't think that a corrupted file is the issue. I have been working on this for a month, and I haven't imported any new clips since then. This issue only started a few days ago. 

I don't know if this is a problem with Premiere or with my computer. My laptop is fairly new, I update and restart it several times a week, and I don't have any background processes running while I work on videos. I thought it was my dorm's terrible WiFi at first, but my other projects seem to function fine, and my video clips are stored in a physical hard drive that is hooked up to my computer. 

If anyone has any idea how to fix this, please let me know. In between homework, research, etc., I don't have a lot of free time to work on my videos, so this issue is very frustrating to deal with. 

[jtstrecker]

I have been having the same problem for a month or more now. I wish I had an answer! Would love to know why this is happening!

[Genevieve B.]

Try checking your graphics card/drivers (I found them under Device Manager --> Display Adaptors). My Dell Inspiron laptop was supposed to have both integrated Intel graphics software and a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card. Turns out there was something wrong with the card, and it actually hadn't been functioning since I got the computer six months ago. Sent it to a repair shop, and they had to replace the entire motherboard. 

I haven't had time to fully test it out yet, but I'm hoping that fixes the issue. Once I figure out if Premiere Pro has stopped freezing, I will update the post.  

[Genevieve B.]

It was working fine until about 10 minutes into editing. Then, it froze again after I tried to cut 2 seconds off of a clip. I would like to reiterate that my computer is barely six months old and is supposed to have plenty of memory and processing power. While it did have an issue with the graphics card, it spent a week at a repair shop, and it should be fixed now. I got my entire motherboard replaced, as well as a full systems restore - meaning everything was wiped from the computer, so I had to back up all of my files onto a hard drive. I installed Adobe and downloaded Premiere Pro, and now it's freezing again. Since practically all the hardware on my computer was replaced and my software reset, I am starting to think this is either a corrupted file issue or a problem with Premiere itself. I don't know what to do next; this project is halfway done and it has already taken several months to procure all of the footage and start piecing it together. I don't want to restart the entire project, so should I copy/paste pieces of the timeline into a new project file?? These issues are bringing me close to tears and I just want the program to function like it is supposed to without freezing every damn minute, I'm so tired. 

[louismason]

hi I'm experiencing the same problem. Holy cow is it annoying. 

[Genevieve B.]

It appears to be an issue with the version of Premiere Pro. I rolled back to version 23.5, and it appears to be working fine now. Apparently, the new 24.0 update also has the same issue, so I guess I'm going to stick with this version until Adobe actually fixes it.  

[James30609036g4e1]

I am still having this issue, it's genuinely unusable - is everyone in this thread still having the same issue or have they stayed with an older version of Premiere Pro? 

[anchorshairco]

Same! I reverted back to 23.5 and it still is happening. 

[James30609036g4e1]

I rolled back to 23.6.2 in the end and removed the beta and latest version of Premiere and it seems to work ok now - going to just stick to that version whilst I have a lot of work on, when things quieten down I'll attempt to give a newer Premiere a go

[anchorshairco]

Nice! Thank you for the recommendation I'll give that a try today.