Premiere Pro So Slow It's Unusable + External GPUs

[Chinchilla]

Hi there, I have a macbook pro and running the latest version of premiere, details of the mac are:

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 and it has 16gb of RAM.

I have been working on a film project that's grown and grown and it is now feature length. The video footage is 4K scaled to a 1080p timeline and colour is by FilmConvert. I don't have lots of video tracks running on top of each other. 

However now I can barely do anything on the project without it crashing or it is so laggy I can't do any creative editing. I was even looking into external gpus that might help the computer deal with the work load but I don't know if the cost of this would have benefit?

Has anyone been in the same boat, that can offer any advice?

[Ann Bens]

Might want to cut the project up in smaller projects

When ready export all project to intermediate files and put those files in a main project for final export.

[Chinchilla]

Hi Ann,

I only want to do that as a last resort as I need to watch the whole things in it's entirety to have a feel for the film.

I was looking into external gpu's that might help me do this, do you have any experience using one?