Multiple monitor resolutions breaks many features in Premiere. A bug persisting over 10 years

Report · Oct 11, 2023

Adobe, you need to look into this. This has been a bug for over a decade and I have seen countless forum posts about this. Never once a real response or anyone actually looking into this issue. This is so frustrating, why do you never fix things that have been chronically broken?

If you're using multiple monitors of varying resolutions. My setup is 2 - 3840x2160 and 1 - 1920x1080 monitors. The amount of things that break is insane. Mercury Transmit does not and will not work unless you do some of the most insane workarounds that make it impossible to use, every single eyedropper selection in the program breaks, it will not select the right pixels. Full screen playback will appear somewhere in the top right corner of a monitor and show 1/4 of the playback.

I am positive there are more, these are the few that have plagued my workflow for years. You need to have someone actually look into this. Please for the love of god.

This is a problem that has persisted across every version of Premiere and every version of Windows. It happens on AMD components, Intel or Nvidia. Do not ask me for further details on specs, it doesn't matter. Just have anyone in the Adobe office plug a 4k and a 1080p monitor into the same Windows machine and you will see exactly what the issue is.

Report · Oct 11, 2023

The Adobe devs run a lot of mulitple monitor setups. And personally, I've run four monitors at a time, without most anything you've experienced. So ... depending on all sorts of things, one may or may not have the issues you are having.

Which is NOT to say that they don't need to improve the monitor use, as I'll get to in a bit. But first, what I run.

My main UI monitor is an LG 2540x1080 (if I recall correctly) "Ultrawide" ... with the main Pr UI window and menu system "maximized" on that screen.
Second monitor is a Dell 1920x1080, with a panel group created such that it leaves a tiny bit of space around the panel, guaranteeing it does NOT over-run onto another monitor ... absolutely a no-no. This has the Production panel, all projects including in it of course, in the main part of the panel group. Depending on the workspace in use, I may also have the Effects panel in a tall narrow strip along the side "next" to the main screen.
Third monitor is a BenQ UHD ... 3840x2160 ... that is used solely for Transmit Out.
Fourth monitor is a small Elecrow 1920x1080, used with a panel on it for Source monitor.

My only problem is on opening, Project panels may well appear back in that lower left quadrant panel group of the main UI screen, and need to get pulled back into proper place. Which yes, is very annoying.

So ... that's been stable for me for several years. Note the bit about making sure no pixels from one monitor panel overlap onto another monitor! Weird, but even one not even visible row of pixels getting onto another screen causes all sorts of problems. So I leave a tiny but visible unused monitor space around monitors 2 and 4, with their separate panel groups.

It would be SO much better if we could simply have Premiere recognize monitors as such, tell it to put this panel on that monitor. And I've asked and pushed for that for a decade now.

Neil