Participant

Question

Premiere pro slows down and lags when images are on the timeline.

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 13, 2021
11 replies
11410 views

Hi there! Any image I put on the timeline, be it jpg or png, makes the premiere incredibly difficult to use. If there is an image present on the timeline, the playhead lags for a second before playing after pressing spacebar. Then when the playhead passes the image, the program monitor freezes and if I stop playback, audio continues to play for a few seconds. Every once in a while it's crashed the program.

The only way I've been able to work is to render preview over the images via in-to-out. I have tried uninstalling premiere, cleareing my caches, etc.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Windows 10

Latest version of premiere 22

M

marc_lowel_1816

Participant

2025 and this is still an issue. Same problem here what a hassle

P

p_2657

Participant

Yup, nesting does appear to fix... but my video was going to take literally days to export without nesting any 24mpx images that appear on the timeline. Bit of a pain to add all of these workarounds to my workflow

A

alex_9056

Participant

Absolutely unacceptable and unbelievable that this is still happening in 2025. Hostile behavior once again from Adobe to its users.

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hey @alex_9056,

Are you also having this issue with images in the Timeline? Let me know. I can take a look at the image or pass it along to devs. This is a user to user forum and they might not see this message. Hope I can help. Feel free to send me a PM.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

Wave Digital Arts

Inspiring

It's 2025 and I'm still having this issue. Did anyone ever find a fix?

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

How large are the images, @Wave Digital Arts? How about your Sequence Size?

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hi Kevin,

It happens with sequences of any size/complexity. The issue is worse with high-res images (around 20MP), but still occurs with lower-res images.

I'm working on an M1 Max MacBook Pro, which can handle high-bitrate 8K video footage perfectly fine, so it's really strange that it can't handle similar or even lower resolution JPEGs.

- Joe

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I'm referring frame size and no other image data, like MP. My old school workflow always begins before the edit by spending time in Photoshop optimizing images for use in video production. If you don't need to scale them in an animation, keep them at the native frame size of the sequence for best results. If you have 8K images, you need to be judicious in how large a frame size you'd optimize those for beyond the native sequence size. It's not only the images, it's that you are scaling them and animating them, etc., which takes extra processing power. NLEs have always seemed to handle images differently than digital video and can be a source of performance issues. I hope the advice helps.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

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Aubrie330001303a7s

Participant

I had this issue as well on PP 2023. My whole laptop starts to lag, I also see Task Manager that my CPU is using 100% (means it's working way more than it should). Then I had to check the size of the photo and it was massive. The problem was the size of the photo itself, it is way too big for premiere to render for playback. So, what I did was just to resize it through a free site on the Internet - and voila! It worked! I was able to finish my project smoothly. Hope this helps!

harryc62504054

Participant

Hi - I have this exact issue, with Premiere Pro 2024. What would you say was a file size that was 'too big'? I've lost a day/half day trying to work out why my timeline keeps lagging/stopping when it encounters a pdf that I've converted to a jpeg/png with Adobe Acrobat. Haven't tried to the Photoshop solution/conversion yet though. Thanks

caroline_edits

Community Manager

Sorry to see this issue, everyone!

We have a tutorial here with some potential fixes for choppy playback. Let us know if any of the steps listed here help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0D1uCKmNSQ

If it does not help, open your Audio Hardware Preferences and set the default input to "None."

PC: use the toolbar at the top to go to Edit>Preferences>Audio Hardware
Mac: use the toolbar at the top to go to Premiere Pro>Settings>Audio Hardware

Other community members have suggested converting the image to a .PSD if you have Photoshop. This should be a last resort, but if that is the only thing that works for you, please let us know.

J

Josh306561665sft

Participant

Hi,

Thought I may add a little information here I have tested.

I had a .webp image in my project files, even though I wasn't using it, it was interfering with animation, selection of items on the timeline and even slowing the load of the project to a crawl. Once deleted, everything was as normal.

J

Josh306561665sft

Participant

Back again, further information found. It seems there is a limit to how many images you can pull in. The webp was just the last component. As I continued and added more files, I tried the Photoshop file trick to no avail.

In the end, I placed all my images into a new bin, and the speed returned.

Z

ZZD27237427d5wm

Participant

Did you ever find a fix to this? I'm having the same issue right now

C

Carmine22378869hlx3

Participant

I had the exact same problem but only under very specific circumstances.
whenever i was editing with a custom workspace that used two monitors i had this problem. What i found odd tho was that when i switch to a preset that only used one monitor it fixed my problem completely. so i just rearranged my "assembly" workspace preset to use two monitors and now the problem is gone. idk why or how this happened but if it worked for me it might work for you.

i also want to note that when i was experiencing the problem only the timeline panel was laging, i was able preview my video at full scale, add and remove files / effects and whenever i would click play on the timeline or jumped to a random spot on it, my preview would update in time just as normal, but not the timeline. Anything i did had about a minute delay to show up in the timeline panel but it was stillmaking edits to the video files at its normal pace.

V

Vladimir24272714ccb8

Participant

Hi There,

I had same problem. If you still need help with this. Good solution for now is to save it as PSD and add PSD to the timeline, runs very smooth compared to JPG-PNG.