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Working as an assistant logging/preparing a project in Premiere Pro 2023 and getting extremely poor performance across the whole program.
- Thumbnails take forever to load, Media pending
-Extremely laggy UI (2 second wait minimum for UI to respond to mouse clicks / keyboard commands: opening a bin, selecting a clip, menu commands)
- Eventually becomes unusable due to spinning beachball and eventaually becomes unresponsive. Needing to be Force Quit.
Computer / Hardware:
2017 iMac Pro (Ventura OS)
3.2 GHz 8-Core Intel processor
Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB GPU
32GB Ram
All footage stored on a 7200rpm 12GB USB-C SanDisk G-Drive Project
Media Cache etc. set to local Mac hard drive
Settings and things I've tried to improve performance:
- All clips have attached proxies that are toggled on (1080p ProRes Proxy)
- Deleted Media cache many times
- Render settings using GPU acceleration
- Deleted/Reset all preferences
- Deleted all auto-saves
- Allocated 26GB of Ram to Premiere
Restarting the software / computer will SOMETIMES give me about 5-10 minutes of reasonable performance. Before the program grinds to a halt.
I can't really fathom that it might be a hardware issue, just completed a feature film in Avid, using proxies and never had such crippling performance issues.
Any input / help greatly appreciated. I'm losing the plot a bit over here.
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Appreciate you posting this!
What is the exact version of Premiere Pro that you're running? We have made a number of stability and performance improvements in the Premiere Pro 2024 releases. I'd expect your experience will be better in 2024 if you have the freedom to upgrade, as some of what you have reported sounds similar to issues some other users encountered in Premiere Pro 2023.
Otherwise, if you are willing, I can explain to you how to grab samples from Premiere Pro itself as it is running. If you grab a few of these when you encounter the slowdowns (particularly when you see a beach ball), they can help us identify exacly why the system is slowing down. They're small enough to be emailed, and we can then identify if your experience may be related to anything we addressed between 2023 and 2024.
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Hi Ben, Kevin,
The exact version is 23.6.4 (build 2). I will try an update if this is the only/main course of action you recommend. A post-production editing mantra I've held dear for many years is to NEVER update the software in the middle of a project however. If you can detail the process for pulling the sample files when Premiere crashes I will do it. I also intend to test on a higher spec Mac to see if that yields better results.
Thanks.
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A post-production editing mantra I've held dear for many years is to NEVER update the software in the middle of a project
Too true. The only time we suggest it in mission-critical environments is if we know changes have been implemented in newer versions that will directly address an issue head on, especially if that issue is affecting workflow. Of course we always strive for this transition to happen without risking significant fallout, but you're right... normally, just as a measure of safety, productions just stick on a version and upgrade for the next project.
No two projects are the same, and I can't claim to know the details of specifically what Premiere Pro features you are using versus how others may work; that said, we have moved other projects from v23 to v24 with success. As @Kevin-Monahan mentioned, you can run v23 and v24 side by side. You can't downgrade a project from v24 back down to v23, but if you have the freedom/time/interest, you can experiment with copy of your project in v24, while continuing your day-to-day work in your v23 project, to confirm that both the experience will be imporve in v24 and the migration will be successful. Assuming this testing confirms that v24 is a stable and benificial move, you can upgrade when you're ready to do so.
Separately, here are instructions for pulling process samples on a Mac. You can email them to me once you've pulled them. If you can also detail what you were experiencing at the time, or what steps created the slowdown, that's also helpful:
You can take as many samples as you'd like by repeating steps 4-5. In fact, it's actually better for us if you pull a few so that we can confirm consistency across them. If you press Sample Process (step 4) multple times, each resulting Sample window will cover up the last making it appear that the new sample replaced the last, but they are each unique samples. You can then cull through the open unsaved sample windows and save each one as its own file. If you remember, save them with some identifying name of what was happening for reference, instead of Sample 1, Sample 2, Sample 3.
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I have the same. Mac Studio (maxed) PREMIERE PRO 23.1.0 BUILD 86.
In Productions. - I have one 'Project' file that appears to be corrupt by way of the 2-minute Spinning Beachball every 10 seconds, and have extracted samples of the process and labeled them.
I have tested same on 2024, 2025, and Beta to no avail.
I have created a fresh 'project', created new sequences within it and copied only the footage and audio from its ancestor sequence and pasted only the footage and audio clips onto the newly created descendant sequence. - Same problem respawned.
What can I do in order to request a look into the sample files and identify the culprit?
(It's not a youtube-scale video. It's a TV series with thousands of assets.)
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What is the longest sequence in that project? Long sequences with many edits can often cause performance issues.
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1 hour 8 minutes. - I have several 3-hour "b-roll library" sequences in other sub-projects of the Production that have worked well for years. - But I had not considered going through the project in a hunt for long sequences and trimming them as an effort to resolve the issue. I will try that this week. - But the main Sequence in one of our sub-projects for the Production, is 1 hour 30 minutes with thousands of cuts and overlays, and it has never done this before either. Something new happened, there was an advent.
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Yeah, I'm with you on never updating an editing program in the midst of a project, but if I never did that, I'd be back using the same version of avid I was using in 1995... I've got projects that stay active for many years unfortunately and many projects overlap.. One of the great features of Premiere is that you can have multiple versions on your system so you can update, test the project and if all is ok after banging your head against the wall for a while, you're probably ok to update the project.
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Sorry for the frustration. As @Ben Insler asks, please try a test in the new version. You can run them side by side. Let us know what happens. I'll move this post to Discussions since this is a v.23 issue.
Thanks,
Kevin
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