Premiere Pro - Using too much memory 100GB+

[Morgan29803041oxel]

Hello,

On the Premiere Pro 2023 version, I am experiencing high memory usage. There's about 3 TB of footage/photos/music in my project...the memory usage will grow to be as much as 100GB. This issue has been replicated onto a new laptop. My previous laptop of 16GB, would crash while working on my project. I haven't experienced a crash yet on the new laptop, but the memory usage is still going very high. Please, let me know if I can provide any other information to help find a solution to this.

Laptop specs - Macbook Pro i7 CPU 32GB RAM M1. 

[michelleo16827334]

OK, so most of what you have asked for I don't even know what it is or how to find as I am a very new user of Premiere pro. If you can tell me where to find that info, I am more than happy to provide it.... I just don't know.

I am using mp4 files, I import them into Premiere Pro and then edit them using the razor tool, ripple delete sections, some use of Hard Click Remover, DeNoise, or DeHummer. I am using Gaussian blur and Video Transitions that are available with Premiere Pro.

No third-party plugins. The longest video duration was about 40 minutes, but can happen even on 8-10 minute ones. 

Have tried cutting the larger projects in half but it makes no difference. 

It's probably the most parred back, basic editing of video and audio you can get and it's still running out of memory! 

Let me know how to find the other info if you'd like me to find it! 👍🏼

Not sure if this info I just found is relevant (sorry, i'm so clueless) 

Type: MPEG Movie File Size: 93.24 MB Image Size: 2198 x 1080 Frame Rate: 30.00 Source Audio Format: 44100 Hz - Compressed - Mono Project Audio Format: 44100 Hz - 32 bit floating point - Mono Total Duration: 00:21:35:17 Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0 Alpha: None Color Space: Rec. 709 Color Space Override: Off Input LUT: None Video Codec Type: MP4/MOV H.264 4:2:0

[Michael Grenadier]

mp4 files are heavily compressed and although usually premiere can deal with them without issues, you might try transcoding your camera original to the appropriate prores format and see if that solves the problem.  I'd suggest prores 422 matching the parameters of the camera original (pixel dimensions, frame rate, etc). Post back if you have any questions about this workflow...

[Malcia25704468n3ve]

So this happened to me today and what worked for me was basically:

1. start a new project file

2. copy the current timeline (I had gotten halfway through a video edit when this happened)

3. paste all the clips into a new timeline so that ONLY THE CLIPS USED CURRENTLY are in the media browser

4. closed out the old project (it took a few tries to copy it over because mine was crashing within 30 seconds)

5. use my SSD drive as the "media browser" and only add clips into Premiere I fully plan to use.

It is not ideal, but it saved me in this current project. I hope Premiere figures out the glitch because although I was shooting 4k, this was footage for a 5-minute video, not an hour-long project.

[Michael Grenadier]

Unfortunately in the real world, workarounds are often necessary... and have been since the birth of computer based non-linear editing system.  Thanks for posting your solution...  

[DoogleDood]

Hi all,

Having the same problem here.

Active timelines no longer than 10 minutes, but include nested sequences / multicams that include up to 40 minutes of footage. Sony a7s series footage; Stock footage in MP4 at 4K; A couple of AVIs created from image sequences; Audio in WAV and MP3 formats; Lumetri Color; Audio Effects (Denoiser, DeReverb, Parametric EQ); Image Files such as PNG and JPG; Color Mattes; These are the details I can think to include right now. It's being edited on an MSI GP76 Leopard (32GB RAM; 8GB Dedicated GPU RAM) off of external storage (attempted SSD and External bay of HDDs). I have nested sequences within nested sequnces, and--completely anecdotally--I seem to remember having this issue in the past with other projects that involved a lot of multi-layered nesting. I just resolved an issue where audio artifacts were introduced in the exported file, and the resolution was to flatten the nested audio so there was only one "layer" between the exported sequene and the raw audio files. The memory leak issue was happening in the midst of troubleshooting the audio artifacts, and the memory leak issue became particularly frequent as I began to interact direclty with the multi-layered nested squences so I could flatten the audio. So, again, anecdotal... but have nested sequences been explored as a contributing factor to the issue? Is Premiere holding previews in the cache for every layer of the nesting?

And to anyone else having this issue, are you using nested sequences a lot or no?

Thanks to the community members and Adobe team for being responsive. This has been a long running issue for many, and I would love to contribute to its remedy.

[Tim26371809b5pe]

Same issue here. Activity monitor shows 500+ GB of VM Compressed Memory being used. It's happened several times over the last few weeks. I've restarted, cleared memory, and it still keeps happening. I generate a lot of small projects (usually less than a minute), and they all have 4K 60fps MP4 footage from a Sony a7siii. Occasionally, I will use GoPro Hero 10 clips and (more rarely) Mavic Air 2S clips. Most of the clips have time remapping, and most of them are nested and stabilized. These projects use a couple of After Effects compositions,  several instances of the same MOGRT (based on very complex After Effects compositions), and lumetri color across the board. I leave lumetri scopes open constantly (because I don't want to hunt for it when I need it).

 

[Michael Grenadier]

You're asking an awful lot of your system with 4k 60fps mp4 source files.    as I suggested above, a proxy workflow might ease things up a bit.  And if you're not constantly using the lumetri scopes, you can assign a keyboard shortcut that will quickly open the scopes.    Using the render and replace command or rendering out your AE comps in AE and then placing them on top of the AE comp in your timeline may also speed things up.   I know this may not be ideal, but not sure what else you can do...Testing these "workarounds" and monitoring the RAM usage may help pinpoint exactly what's causing this...  

[514tan]

Having a similar problem on my 2019 iMac i9, Vega 48, 128gb ram. Short timelines (1-6 minutes) of several dozen clips of Sony a7iv footage shot in 10bit 422 HS will bring premiere to a crawl and ram usage spikes to 100gb plus another 100gb+ in swaps. After several minutes I get the alert that the computer is out of application memory, or sometimes premiere crashes without that warning popping up at all. I've tried putting the footage on the internal and an external ssd and there's no difference. I've tried using ProRes proxies and that also makes no difference.

The only thing that fixes this issue is if I transcode full res ProRes files in ME first, then import just those files into Premiere. Once one single original HEVC file from my camera is imported into the media library (not even on the timeline yet) the ram starts to creep up nonstop until it uses up everything my machine has. This is happening on v24 and has also happened on the various v23 versions. 

Hoping someone knows how I can fix this without each of my small projects having to start as several TB due to having to use full res ProRes to start editing. For reference, I tried dropping the original HEVC footage into Resolve and it does not have the same runaway ram issue, which leads me to believe it's not a file/codec or hardware problem. Thanks in advance.