Premiere Pro crashing and slow rendering - is it my laptop or a fault in Premiere?

[sjhfletch]

Hi there,

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm running Premiere from my Acer Swift 3 laptop with 8GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 5 processor and around 80GB free disk space. I recently updated to the latest Premiere software but the rendering and export times are really slow - they were even before the update. A 3-minute video took 1 hour to export yesterday - 40 seconds of this was in 4k. 

The laptop is only 2 and a half years old and even the slightest change in Premiere - like changing opacity from 100% to 33% - results in the render bar going from green to red, also making editing 5 times slower. I've changed my sequence setting to Quicktime - 422 proxy but this has resulted in Premiere crashing when rendering or exporting. 

Does anyone have any advice as to how I can increase rendering and exporting times? Thanks for all your help

[RjL190365]

It is your laptop. It does not have enough system RAM to run any newer version of Premiere Pro properly to begin with. And it does not have a discrete GPU at all - but instead, the Radeon GPU is actually part of the Ryzen 5 2500U APU without its own discrete RAM (it steals part of your laptop's main RAM instead). That leaves you with less than 2 GB of total available RAM to run any of your apps, especially since the default Windows 10 install and configuration eats up more than 4 GB of that paltry 8 GB of installed RAM.

Also, that Ryzen 5 2500U is not all that powerful to begin with, being based on the first-gen Zen architecture that debuted in the desktop Ryzen 1000 series from mid-2017.

No wonder why your laptop chokes on anything that's both CPU- and RAM-intensive.

[Peru Bob]

around 80GB free disk space.

By @sjhfletch

...another reason.

[John T Smith]

Read this before you buy something new

https://community.adobe.com/t5/video-hardware/premiere-pro-hardware-articles-to-read-before-you-buy-...

[basil1891]

Does anyone have any advice as to how I can increase rendering and exporting times?  You did mean decrease I guess ‌‌

Do you have Mercury Playback Engine GPU acceleration (OpenCL) enabled? Check Project setting > General > Renderer ... If it's grayed out try to update drivers from AMD site.

Regarding crashes. Barring general HW/OS-stability issues,  it can be because of low RAM installed. These tips may help but only to some degree:

1) Change 'Optimize rendering ..' to "Memory" (Edit > Preferences > Memory.. )

2) Restart Premiere Pro, or even reboot a PC before starting export. Turn off all unnecessary background apps.

3) Also, setting sequence to Prores 422 proxy while having only 80GB free space may be not a good idea.

[Ann Bens]

1) Change 'Optimize rendering ..' to "Memory" (Edit > Preferences > Memory.. )

By @basil1891

The only time one switches to Memory if rendering/export stops and Premiere gives a low memory warning.