Sudden High CPU Usage - Windows

Report · Apr 15, 2025

I have worked with 4K footage on two projects recently that are incredibly laggy and using >90% CPU usage.

This did not used to happen. I have seamlessly worked on 4k and 6k footage in HEVC encoding in premiere projects with no issue, adding transitions and effects.

Now I can't even scrub through a timeline of just footage without serious lag and I'm not sure what could be causing it. I attempted to change the encoding of files from HEVC to ProRes which helped but it also quintupled my file size which isn't sustainable.

Oddly, when I go back into older projects with similar footage and codecs there are no issues, it works smoothly, which makes me think the projects must be corrupted, however when I tried copying and pasting the footage across into a new project I got the same issues.

I have tried updating premiere, updating windows, clearing my media cache, keeping my preview window at 1/8 quality, ensuring hardware encoding is enabled and setting premiere as priority in task manager. I'm not sure what else I can do so any help would be really appreciated.

my PC hardware specs:
- i7-14700KF

- RTX 4070S

- 32GB DDR5 RAM 5600MHz

- 2TB SSD

Report · Apr 15, 2025

Hi Hollbird,

Welcome to the community, & I'm sorry to hear about the poor experience. We can get this checked. Could you please share the other specifications of the media files (frame rate, bit depth & chroma subsampling) & the effects applied? Please also ensure that under File > Project Settings > General, Renderer is set to Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA).

Thanks,

Sumeet

Report · Apr 15, 2025

@Hollbird I sent you an email. We would be interested in getting on a call with you to discuss the issue you're seeing.

Regards,

Fergus