My premiere pro has been crashing more and more over the past few months

[Luke30848038rnba]

Every time I try to do anything other than a single-track timeline, my program constantly seizes up. It crashes incessantly and randomly, and I have to save every time I do anything to not lose progress to the 2 crashes a minute. I have never run into this issue so severely with Premiere. It's frustrating when things like cap cut have better features, are free, and don't crash. I am tired of this crap, and I have music videos to edit. What am I supposed to do with this trash? Eventually, it gets so bad that just changing the —workspace makes it crash. Unacceptable. I have a 3000$ fully optimized graphics card for this, and nothing else on my computer has any issues. What am I supposed to do to fix my premiere? I already use Cap Cut and iPhone more because of the ease of use, better UI, and superior workflow (EXTREMELY SUPERIOR to Adobe's garbage).

Moderator note: Please refrain from using profanity. We have minors reading here.

[R Neil Haugen]

I've over a decade troubleshooting for people in Premiere. But because you don't give any details whatsoever, I can't even make a wild guess. You can't get it better until others know enough to help.

And as several million daily users are getting by just fine, yea, we do need to know why on your machine it's behaving so wretchedly.

OS/CPU/GPU, GPU driver, media used, effects used, storage media, and what type of things you do on your timelines with what. As all these things matter when trying to troubleshoot remotely.

And we all would like to be able to help!

[Luke30848038rnba]

Okay maybe this will help. I just booted up a brand new project. Imported 2 cameras. First one is a canon xc15 in 1080. Second is a gopro in 4k. Editing the gopro footage seemed fine for a couple seconds, just placing it on a timeline and moving it into place. I changed the sequence to 1920x1080 as well. Then I placed the gopro footage above it on the timeline. Seems like premiere really doesnt like it when I stack footage. I started cutting up the xc15 camera footage and premiere started crashing again. I don't think I am even putting it under any stress at all, so it is hard to specify an issue when even the simplest tasks are impeded by premiere's 'work flow.' That being said, I did a fair amount of element 3d effects in after effects yesterday and had no issue working with things in ae. The problem really seems to be premiere. And before you ask, I've already tried uninstalling ALL of my plugins, resetting to default, chearing cache and uninstalling and reinstalling the software. Nothing I do seems to make an impact.

[R Neil Haugen]

So one camera media is an MXF of Canon X-AVC 422 8bit long-GOP/H.264. 

And the other is a GoPro, also long-GOP, and GoPros are about the nastiest at recording long-GOP made.

So what is your hardware? Again, the details matter. I still can't even start to guessing.

[Luke30848038rnba]

What do you mean by hardware? I just gave you the camera specs. How about asking specific questions instead of claiming you don't have any information. I Just dropped two explanations for you with as much info as I could include that is relevant. If you can't make a single inference based on what I am telling you or evcen come up will thoughtful followup questions, you really should try something else in life pal.

[R Neil Haugen]

You are having problems with processing and an application on your computer. So the natural, and required data for helping, is to know what hardware your computer is. I'm not asking for fun.

I've rather more experience troublshooting than the average bear, btw ... and never ask frivolous questions.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi,

I'm Kevin, one of the moderators here. Thanks for filing your bug report, Luke. I hope the team will respond shortly.

Cheers,
Kevin

[Luke30848038rnba]

Thank you Kevin, Neil can't seem to understand that my issue is extremely simple.

[R Neil Haugen]

I've long experience in troubleshooting Premiere issues, and a long record of successfully doing so. But to troubleshoot any issue takes information. Not one of the engineers could help you without also getting the basic data, the very simple, normal and always requested data for troubleshooting.

I simply don't understand why you don't want to help get your issue fixed ... which is all I'm trying to do. But I'm not omniscient. We all need your help so we can get you going.

[Luke30848038rnba]

What computer specs do you need?
Here is a list of my computer parts:
CPU
Intel Core i7-13700KF 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor
Motherboard
MSI MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Memory
G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory
Storage
Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Video Card
Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB Video Card

I really run into a lot of issues with multi clipping. I always make sure my footage is the same frame rate and ratio before clipping, but I keep getting the 'error retrieving frame' message and then I am met with crashes and lagging when I move the play head. Hoping this helps. thanks.

[jamieclarke]

Hi @Luke30848038rnba - What version of Premiere are you running?  We recently made some updates in the beta version 24.6 when working with MXF files.  Please open the creative cloud desktop app under the beta apps in the side bar and try downloading Premiere Pro 24.6 beta.  Alwasys remember to hold down shift after any installation and check the boxes to clear media chache, reset plugin cache and if you have any problems you can test by disabling third party plugins to troubleshoot.  Let us know how it goes.

[R Neil Haugen]

It looks like from your media list you have a lot of long-GOP, the H.264 type stuff ... but sadly, your CPU does not have the internal QuikSync hardware to do "hardware encoding" part for that. That's the "F" part of the KF specs. 

The i7-13700K CPU specs list both the internal GPU capabilities of that chip, and of course, that it has QuikSync. Which is the differention between K and KF chips.

So your CPU hardware has a rather heavy limitation for working with the media you're using. Bummer, that. And this is why hardware matters. Your CPU is having to do 'software' computations for all that media of yours, which is not nearly as fast nor efficient.

This is where the GPU you have may help with that a lot, from having looked through the Puget testing reports. The frustrating thing for us users is that I'm not sure Premiere can really use the H.264 capabilities of the GPU as "naturally" as it does for a CPU with built-in H.264 support.

So it would be very interesting to hear how good your H.264 playback and export encoding has been up until it started bonking on you. As that's a GPU that I have looked at for an update myself.

But those are basic performance potential issues ... the crashing, that's ... different. It's probably less likely to be a hardware issue with that GPU like over-taxing the power connection or over-heating. Don't know what your CPU cooling is of course.

And do you have any other drives involved or just the one Nvme drive?

Also, if you have a clip that routinely bonks things, if you could share that for testing, it would be handy.

[Luke30848038rnba]

So am I potentially losing quality on my exports? Usually I will match source with exports and then my final projects are4 typically encoded in 1080 and a preset my job uses to stream its content on television. Seems like things were good and worked well until about a month ago but maybe upgrading my pc would help. What would you recommend? I have always suspected that I may not have given it enough power but building pcs isnt my area of expertise and I am not sure. I have tried using proxies and I will try the beta version of premiere but it really seems like the issues present themselves when I do multiclips and especially when I am doing the lumetri color effect.

Nonetheless, here is a link to the full list of the parts that I used to build my pc: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/vsnWY9

Thanks!

[Luke30848038rnba]

Update: I am getting a lot of 'error retrieving frame/error substituting frame' with the beta version of premiere. It doesn't seem like my pc is getting hot as I am working on this but skipping in the footage and difficulty with playback are prevalent as I am working through this. I made sure that I cleared media cache and I verified that this specific footage is not variable framerate. Is there a way I can rule out potential performance issues with my pc as it is before considering an upgrade?

Maybe some recommendations on how to record footage on my XC15 in the future as to avoid some of these issues?

[R Neil Haugen]

@RjL190365 is the resident expert on parts. If they pop in, you'll got some useful comments.

I'm not expecting so much losing quality on exports as being related to the difficulty the machine is having at times processing things. As a possibility. 

One essential part of troubleshooting is knowing how and when to make guesses, to enable following up the answers with more usefully directed thoughts. For this kind of thing, I am more a help in getting the 'big picture' laid out for some of the really hot shots to stop by and give the final answer.

On other things, I'm the 'hotshot'. But like Dirty Harry said, a man's got to know his limitations ... 

[Luke30848038rnba]

I appreciate the help Neil. Can you check out my cooling and power supply from that parts list I sent to see if I would need to upgrade any of that hardware?

Also, could you recommend a cpu chip that would lift some of the limitations you are mentioning?

[Luke30848038rnba]

Wait I see what you are saying my bad! I am working through this project with some proxies at the moment in the beta premiere which seems to be working okay. Still getting the occasional frame substitution error but the program is stable at least for now!

[R Neil Haugen]

Good to hear you've got some working steps going. Work's gotta get out, right? And I'm all about the practical ... what gets it out is what I does ...

[Luke30848038rnba]

Just wanting to update you Neil! I finished my working draft of the project and I am happy to report that I was able to complete my multiclip, add the presentation in and input my lower third and outro/intro presets without any crashes. I let the program do its thing with fully loading the footage in the bottom corner and things seemed to work after that.

I did note some weird behavior encoding that I have forgotten to mention. When I go to export a project, it will get stuck at 100% for a long time and I will watch as the different files in the destination folder populate to the full size of the project 4 or 5 times as the whole thing compresses I guess. Maybe this slow speed could shed some light on the issue? Just trying to provide as much info as possible!

Thanks again!

[R Neil Haugen]

SO glad you got that done!

As to the export, Premiere needs around 5 times the final size of the exported file free,  on the drive it is exporting to, while it is doing the encoding. If it doesn't, it can take longer, or worst case, fail during the encoding.

This can be a problem with hour long sequences  ... ah, yes ...

[Luke30848038rnba]

Yes. So I will stay posted to this thread just in case. But I do still want to verify. Would a different cpu chip help with some of these ongoing issues, and if so, what would be a good option to upgrade to?

I appreciate all the help so far!

[R Neil Haugen]

As to the CPU chip, yea, an Intel K without the F ... would include internal iGPU and the QuickSync process for H.264/5 decoding/encoding ... which would be a good help in your case.