A Low Level Exception Occurred - Premiere 2025?

[Sam27677885d4rl]

I am suddenly getting the "A low level exception occurred" and can not playback in program monitor. All of the solutions that I looked up online said to change the renderer to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only. Unfortunately, in Premiere 2025 the option to change the renderer is locked and will not allow me to make changes. 

Has anyone found a solution to this? I am in the middle of editing a feature film and this is certainly a frustrating interruption.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hey there, @Sam27677885d4rl,

Thanks for the message. I'm not sure what kind of media you're editing. Which camera and what format are you editing with? Can you give us full details about your computer system? More info would help, please. Let us know.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Sam27677885d4rl]

Canon 90D, files are MP4. Editing on a 2022 Macbook Pro, 8GB memory, M2 Chip.

[Sam27677885d4rl]

The file now seems to be corrupted. When I open it and try to do anything it crashes rather quickly.

I was able to create a new project and import all the files from the corrupted project, as well as copy/paste the entire sequence into the new project. That seems to be working... but for how long I wonder? Definitely paranoid of it happening again. 

I've yet to see anyone else having this issue with the renderer in the latest update of Premiere. 

[Warren Heaton]

If you are going to be editing on a regular basis, I would switch to a MacBook Pro with the recommended amount of RAM (16GB) or more.  My main workstation for work has 192GB of RAM and my personal laptop has 32GB.  

I would also transcode the file that is crashing to ProRes in the Finder, After Effects, or Shutter Encoder.