Premiere Pro takes extremely long time loading and "relinking" clips when media is on a NAS over SMB

[jd_9026]

Hi,

I'm using Premiere Pro 25.2.3 on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra (128 GB RAM) with Mac OS Sequoia 15.4.1.  I use a QNAP NAS (3088XU-RP) wired over 25 GbE SFP28 cabling.  My read/write speeds exceed 2000 MB/Sec over SMB.

I began a new project recently (as a Premiere Production) with approximately 100 hours of footage, all processed to proxies as ProRes Proxy codec within Premiere.  There are approximately 900 clips in the project that contains our media within the Production.  When accessed over SMB, Premiere Pro takes upwards of 10+ minutes to fully load the project.  Specifically on the background task of "relinking" every time the project is opened.  Once everything is finally loaded the performance is fine.

But when I move all that media to an external SSD (APFS formatted) or even an iSCSI volume from the same NAS (effectively just a block level APFS volume over the network), Premiere Pro loads this project and completes the background "relinking" task is 5 seconds or less.  So I am concluding that this is clearly a problem with how Premiere is accessing files over SMB protocol, at least with Mac OS.

This is a very troubling issue, since using share folders over SMB on my NAS allows me to collaborate locally with multiple systems, and is the very purpose of owning a NAS in a post production environment.  I cannot speak to if this issue has occured with earlier versions of Premiere, but it must be fixed!  Thank you for your time.

Best,

JD Marlow

www.jdmarlow.com

[jamieclarke]

Hi @jd_9026 -

Thanks for submitting your bug report, and for the detailed information you’ve provided it’s incredibly helpful. We’re actively tracking this issue when media is stored on a NAS system.

Out of curiosity, would you be able to update your system to macOS 15.5? One of the updates mentions: “Fixed: Network shares containing large amounts of data are incorrectly enumerated.” I’m wondering if that change might help resolve the issue you’re seeing.

Also, if possible, could you post a screen recording with Activity Monitor running in the background? We really appreciate your help, and we’re sorry you’re dealing with this we know how disruptive these issues can be.

[jd_9026]

Jamie,

Thank you so much for the fast reply.  I'm not able to update to MacOS 15.5 at this time due to incompatibility with some other apps, but in the mean time I've done screen recordings of what happens when I open this project in my Premiere Production.  It may look like the progress bar is moving at a decent clip on the relink, but I promise it takes about 10 minutes by the time it's fully linked.  When I'm on an iSCSI volume or an external SSD this process is virtually instant.  Here are the screen recordings:

Relinking: https://vimeo.com/1088555910

Activity Monitor: https://vimeo.com/1088554913

Password for both videos is: edit123

[BrandonBernier]

Experiencing this exact same issue. 14 Mac Studios all connected via 10G to a large 800TB NAS. Relinking and media pending lasts for so long that we have had to downgrade back down to 2024.

[jdmarlow0]

Brandon what version of Mac OS were you running?