Extremely slow preview of footage from older sequence

Report · Jul 30, 2019

I've been working on a couple projects where I need to grab some clips from an old project, so I import a couple sequences from other Premiere files. Once I do that, everything comes to a near standstill. It takes 20-30 seconds just for a view of any of the newly imported clips to show up in the Program window. The footage in the original timeline plays mostly OK, a little slow, but the newly imported clips in that timeline take forever to appear in the preview, and do not play at all.

I've turned off effects, lowered the playback and paused resolution to 1/4, cleaned the media cache, updated Nvidia drivers, made sure the clips were on a fast 7200 rpm drive.

What's really weird, is the first project I was having trouble with seems to be OK now after a couple of days, playback is pretty smooth.

Has anyone had problems like this? Thx

4k files on a Windows machine, 32GB, Premiere 13.1.2

Report · Jul 31, 2019

This could be the result of Premiere 'consolidating' the footage as it is imported. In the bottom right of the sequence panel, you may see a blue indicator which shows the progress of the consolidation. Does the playback speed improve once this is complete?

I have also occasionally noticed that this process takes a while to complete when importing projects that were originally from older versions of Premiere, and haven't yet really found a faster way to deal with it.

Do you have the same problem if you import the clips directly (rather than via a project import)? If you are only working with a few specific clips, perhaps this might be more efficient?

Report · Jul 31, 2019

Yeah, I get the "Media Pending" window and the blue indicator, but this is long after all that has finished. I imported a couple clips directly, and they work fine. Then I tried opening the old sequence, copying the clips from the timeline and pasting them into the new timeline, and that also seems to work fine, and it keeps my trimming, color correction and metadata notes, so that's great because it's hundreds of clips that I'm working with.

So it's something to do with importing an old sequence through Dynamic Link server.

Thanks for the reply.

... oops, after copying the clips, Premiere just crashed - time to restart and see what I've got.

Report · Jul 31, 2019

This could be the result of Premiere 'consolidating' the footage as it is imported

The blue indicator you refer to has nothing to do with consolidation, which Premiere Pro doesn't do on it's own. That indicator is for Cache files, something very different.

Report · Jul 31, 2019

Hoped I had it figured out with the copy/paste, but still having problems, copied and pasted some other clips, and things bogged down again. Also having issues with fonts not loading (Sky Fonts and Fonts.com). Ugh.

Report · Jul 31, 2019

Trashed the preferences and cache (Hold Shift-Alt when starting Premiere) and that *seems* to have fixed it. Fonts are still messed up, but at least I can edit. Fingers crossed that it keeps working. Should have tried that sooner, that was my go-to fix for just about everything when on a Mac.