Premiere Pro 2020 unusable in Catalina (MacBook Pro)

[DocWalls]

Any guidance appreciated. I use a mid-2015 MacBook Pro (i7 quad-core, 16GB DDR3, iris pro 1536 MB) running Catalina. I haven't added any new hardware or software to my system recently and all applications are updated. A few weeks ago Premiere Pro 2020 started to freeze occasionally and when it did my entire OS stopped responding. It has become very much worse in the last 2 weeks. When I start PP it will open and load properly but after importing media from my external HD into a new project it starts to lag after every command. The lag gets so bad that the program is unusable. When I try to close PP it hangs and I have to force close it. Once PP is closed, my computer starts to function normally again. I have no problem with Audition, Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, etc. When trying to use Premiere, if I open my Activity Monitor from Utilities, it shows more than 100 "cron" processes active in the CPU tab. When I close Premiere those processes all disappear. I have reset my preferences, reset SMC and PRAM/NVRAM, done a reinstall of Premiere. Immediately on reopening Premiere the whole crash sequence begins again. It took me 12 hours and twenty restarts to edit a 10 minute video yesterday. I am at my wits end as my job depends on being able to use this program. I have researched the spawning "cron" scheduling processes but I lack the necessary Unix basics and can't make sense of the stuff I've read. I feel like this has to be part of the problem but have no idea what to do about it, other than switch to Final Cut. If anyone can point me in the right direction I would be most appreciative. Thank you.

[Moving from generic Start/Help forum to the specific Program forum... Mod]
[To find a forum for your program please start at https://community.adobe.com/]

[jane-e]

Hi
I’ve moved this from “Get Started” to “Premiere Pro” where you are more likely to get a proper response.
~ Jane

[Meg The Dog]

What kind of source material are your working with?

Has the properties of the source material changed before the crashing started?

How is your source media stored on your system?

According to

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html 

the minimum Vram required for Mac OS is 2 GB, with 4 GB preferred. Your system has 1.5 GB.

If you can get Premiere to open your project, as a test, try going to File > Project Settings > General and set the Renderer to Software Only. Your system will run slower but see if the crashing stops.

MtD

[rmexpress22]

Are you able to copy your project to another drive? Just in case it's a drive issue. Try a different USB port also. Media issues will make things freeze up like what you are describing.

[philipn85014854]

I have a maxed out 2018 iMac with ssds running Catalina  and Adobe Premiere CC (2020) is completely unuasable.  I pay for this I shouldn't have to spend hours troubleshooting just to get this working.  By the way all I am trying to do is scale an image for a 4 second video clip and I can't even change the opacity real time.  If they don't fix this soon I'm switching to final cut and will never use adobe anything ever again real talk.

[craign26306152]

Having the same problem. Premier has come to a complete crawl after upgrading to Catalina

[annachiara3625]

I am having the same issues, after a weekend of crashes when I brought a project over onto my iMac Pro refurb I just purchased that came loaded with Catalina. I was ready to have less wait time on renders and more efficient color correction and I got lagging performance and system crashes. I had to bring the project back over to the laptop to finish it a day late on my deadline.

Anyways, I did a bunch of work with Adobe people to maximize performance, but no dice. I just wiped the startup disk on the new machine and am running a restore on my iMac Pro from my MacBook Pro that is still running Mojave. I am hoping this works and will report back after I give it a week to see how it performs.

It's exhausting to have Apple blame Adobe and Adobe blame Apple, I am second guessing my purchase, though I'm a sucker for design and interface style. It's especially annoying because both sell themselves as making products for professionals, but they need to learn to better support the professionals, when I complained at the store while picking up my repaired laptop Apple told me to switch to Final Cut... has no one learned anything from BetaMax?!

Restore from a Mojave backup if you can, Catalina and Premiere Pro hate eachother for now.

[ceara5C82]

I've been having the same problem. It driving me mad. I've had my laptop for less than 2 weeks, it's the newest model and I dropped a small fortune on it. Definitely shouldn't be encountering this kind of problem with all the money I've dropped into these companies. It's bringing my production to a complete stop and I've spent hours trying to troubleshoot it. Don't even know what to do. 

[annachiara3625]

Reporting back after downgrading my new (also too expensive) machine to Mojave. Outside of an occasional crash on start when opening big old project files full of 4k, which are easy enough to recover, I've had good performance. Get rid of Catalina, save yourself days of pain.

[sssss7008252]

Same problem here, since upgrading to Catalina - might be an O/S thing.  System completely unusable.  

Timeline scrubbing just is UNUSABLE, as if the application is swapped out.   Any interaction with the timeline, takes 5 seconds to respond.   Utterly useless at this time.

Cleaned all app caches, and CC is updated to the latest of everything.  Worked just find on previous High Sierra O/S.

Might be time to downgrade again.

[georgiahilton1]

PREMIER PRO has been totally unusable since I updated to Catalina!    Usless. Now I have to go back to AVID to edit anything.  I've tried all sorts of formats and sequence settings.   I've tried multiple drives,  various ports...    totally unusable.       MACpro 3.5 g 6 core with 64 Gig of memory.      WTF Adobe???