Proxy Queue in Premiere Pro Super Slow

[Sami Succar]

I recently ran into a frustrating issue where adding proxies to the Media Encoder queue was taking forever—not the encoding itself, just the process of getting the clips into the queue. After some trial and error, I may have found a simple workaround that speeds things up significantly!

What’s Happening?

If your source footage is stored in a folder with too many files, Premiere (or Media Encoder) seems to slow down drastically when adding proxy jobs—almost like it’s scanning the entire folder before adding each clip. This happens even if you only import one single file from that folder! So, the slowdown isn’t caused by how many clips you bring into Premiere, but rather by how many files exist in the folder containing the rushes.

The Fix:

I found that simply moving each video file into its own separate folder (or organizing them into smaller subfolders) before importing into Premiere makes a huge difference. Then:

1. Import the organized folders into Premiere instead of all the clips from a single crowded directory.
2. Generate proxies as usual.

The Result:

With this method, the proxy queueing process runs way faster—no more long delays before Media Encoder starts working.

A Note to Adobe Devs:

It seems like Media Encoder might be scanning entire folders before adding proxy jobs, which can cause major slowdowns if the folder has a large number of files. Since this delay happens even when importing just one file from a busy folder, it suggests that the issue isn’t tied to the number of imported clips but to the total number of files in the source folder. If this is the case, it would be great if future updates could optimize this process!

Hope this helps anyone struggling with slow proxy jobs.

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi Sami Succar,

Welcome to the community! We're sorry to hear about this. Could you please confirm the version of Premiere Pro that you are using & if this issue is happening with any specific project or with any specific media type?

Thanks,

Sumeet

[Sami Succar]

Hi Sumeet,

Thank you for looking into this! Also, I’m not so new to the community.

I’m not sure exactly when this issue started happening, as I never tried troubleshooting it before—I used to just let it queue for several hours. But this time, I didn’t have that luxury, so I had to find a solution.

It seems that if the source folder contains over 100 files (or I'm not sure how many), the queueing process slows down drastically.

For this particular project, the source folder had over 1,400 files, and Media Encoder was taking over 5 minutes just to queue each video. To work around this, I created a simple script to split the files into batches of 10 per folder and then imported the resulting 140 folders into Premiere. After doing this, Media Encoder was taking only a couple of seconds per file—which is a completely reasonable speed.

I’m not sure why the number of files in the source folder would impact the queueing process so significantly, especially considering that nothing else changed—same Premiere version, same Media Encoder, same exact video files. The only difference was the number of files in the folder.

I thought I should share my findings in case it helps others, and it would be great if your team could look into this further to see if there’s an underlying issue causing this slowdown.

Thanks!

[Sami Succar]

This is still an issue with the latest update.

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi Sami Succar,

We're sorry about the poor experience. We're unable to repro this at our end, & we'd like to understand more about it.

• Is this happening with a camera folder structure that has metadata files along with lots of media, or is it just a regular folder? Also, does it happen with a specific folder or with any folder with multiple files?
• Does this issue happen in a new project or only with existing projects?
• What is the format of the media being used here?

Thanks,

Sumeet

[R Neil Haugen]

The absolutely crucial first bit of data needed to troubleshoot this was the codec/format, and, created by ... what? In what folder structure?

So Sumeet's question is crucial, but please give the full answer to the above.

[Sami Succar]

Hi Sumeet, sorry for the late reply, I just saw your message.

• Is this happening with a camera folder structure that has metadata files along with lots of media, or is it just a regular folder? Also, does it happen with a specific folder or with any folder with multiple files?

This happens regardless of how the source folder is structured (with or without metada files), and it happens to any folder with large amount of files.

• Does this issue happen in a new project or only with existing projects?

Both.

• What is the format of the media being used here?

The latest time I ran into this I was working with AVC files, but it happens with other formats as well.

But why would the format matter? It really doesn't seem to be an issue with the format. Cause when I run the batch I created to move the files into separate folders (10 videos per folder), it works just fine. The ONLY difference I can spot between when it works well and when it doesn't is the number of files in the source folder. Same SSD, same root directory, same files, same project.

I'll try to record a video for you maybe it makes it a bit clearer.