Premiere Pro Constant Freezing (23.5 - 24.1)

Report · Dec 13, 2023

Wonder if other people experiencing this. Tried with PP 23.5 and 24.1 as I was having a problem with an existing project. So, found I could replicate the problem with new project.

Problem: Premiere Pro gets into a state that every single click of the mouse, action, or menu seletion (pretty much anything) PP has to "think about it," and freezes (either just lags, Not Responding, or spinning wheel) for about 10 seconds... almost like the old days when you ran out of memory and it was reading from the pagefile.

Now, when I open PP, all seems fine. I start a project, all good. But here's where I can replicate the problem.

New project
Make a few bins (audio, images) and import MP3s and Jpgs
Make a new sequence (1080, 29.97fps) from an image
place an mp3 on timeline and stretch image to length of timeline (basically, I'm turnign an audiofile into a "Movie" with a static image.
Now, I have 21 sessions (or episodes), so I start duplicating the sequence in the Bin. When I get to about 15 sequences, everything starts slowing down, and beyond that, PP is virtually unusable becuase of this lag. When I look at task manager, PP looks to be using about 1.2GB Mem, I still have 38GB free.

These projects were fine when I worked on them back in August 2023. I don't have probs with Photoshop, Indesign etc. Although, v23.5 started coming up with a "A low-level exception occurred in: lvcod64.dll" error which I hadn't seen before... tried a fix where I removed the lvcod64.dll from Windows system... got rid of error, but not sure it's related to this.

Tried deleting media-cache and changing to separate SSD.

Only solution I have at the moment is to only have a few sequences per Premiere project... bit of a pain.

My system is:

Windows 10

i7-8700K

64GB Ram

RTX 2070

Report · Dec 13, 2023

I may have found the potential cause... I have a folder mapped as a virtual drive (e.g. subst M: W:\myfolder\) so that when I work on some jobs from one-drive at home, the drive is the same letter as the one at work (as re-linking can be a pain).

So, it would seem that perhaps if the project or any assets are on a virtual drive, premiere pro has a hernia.... that's my guess right now, as I created antoher project, did the steps as above, but made sure I wasn't linking to files via the virtual drive letter, and all seems fine. Re open the project with virtual drive links, and all grinds to a halt.