Laggy, slow Premiere Pro performance? Try these tips (Mac)

[benwinter]

I wanted to assemble all the tips I have used to make Premiere behave speedier that have worked for me. I am on a Mac.

1. Reset Adobe folder permissions

2. Trash Premiere preferences.

3. Delete media cache.

4. Create a new project, and import your old project into it.

5. Make sure the "Essential Graphics" panel is closed when unneeded.

6. Make sure you keep your number of open timelines to a minimum.

7. Transcode all MP4 footage to ProRes.

8. Do not keep a waveform (sound file) open in the Souce Monitor while you edit. (I don't know if others have this issue but it is definitely a bug on my machine, on a brand new Mac Pro 2019 tower it slows my machine considerably)

9. Quit Premiere, open terminal. Type "sudo purge" enter your password, and hit enter. Wait until finished, then re-open Premiere. (As I understand it, this resets unused memory to allow it to be reallocated. Memory can be "lost" if an application crashes and the memory is not "released" back to the OS. Most say this is unneccessary but I have noticed performance improvement without necessitating a restart, and anyway, it is a harmless procedure.)

10. In the Get Info dialog box for the Premiere Pro application, select "Open in Low Resolution", re-open Premiere. (This does not seem to affect anything visually but seems to have fixed a severe lag problem for me recently on a 5K monitor).

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Ben,

Great tips. I also have some of the same troubleshooting tips here. 
I'll be updating this shortly and will keep your list in mind.

Thanks,
Kevin

[danielbg]

We had a very laggy and slow premiere on one of our mac pro 2019

3,3 GHz Intel Xeon W 12 cores (not the fastest I know)

364 go Ram

AMD Radeon Pro vega II 32 go

footage is on a NVME raid 0 and cache is on a separate sata ssd drive

We tried every steps and follow every tutorial to boost performance even tough lots of tips were for slower machine. But premiere was still very laggy even in 1/4 resolution.

Thanks to this post it finally run smoothly like it suppose to be. The step that did the trick was step 9. I have not idea why but I hope this will help other people too.  

[benwinter]

Glad to hear it helped @danielbg, your 2019 Mac Pro setup should be way more than enough to handle editing, it's my setup as well (24-core version). I don't know why Premiere Pro has so many issues on it. I have an M1 MacBook Pro and Ppro runs like a champ on it.

[Kevin-Monahan]

What kind of footage, Daniel? If it's 4K Long-GOP footage, that is handled much better with a Quick Sync capable CPU, significant amounts of RAM, and at least 8 GB VRAM. Otherwise, it is recommended to transcode to an intermediate codec where your CPU can work with less strain.

Thanks,
Kevin

[danielbg]

It's is mainly XAVC footage from our Sony FX9 camera. So I don't think I should need to convert that footage with our current configuration.  

On my M1 macbook pro premiere runs pretty great but it's on one of our Mac pro 7,1 and one of our Imac that premiere was running very slowly and laggy. The memory purge stated by @benwinter on step 9 seems to have fix the very slow response of premiere.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Daniel,

Sorry about that.

It's is mainly XAVC footage from our Sony FX9 camera. So I don't think I should need to convert that footage with our current configuration.  

On my M1 macbook pro premiere runs pretty great but it's on one of our Mac pro 7,1 and one of our Imac that premiere was running very slowly and laggy.

The memory purge stated by @benwinter on step 9 seems to have fix the very slow response of premiere.

Thanks for letting us know. I suspect a bug with these Xeon CPUs and that specific format. I will continue to investigate and advocate for a fix.

Kevin