Force Quit

[Eric Santiago]

Which version of Premiere?

We have a few on Catalina here running 2021.

So far no major crashes.

[Oliver Peters]

Premiere Pro 14.8. The latest release version (not beta). On and off, I’ve had the issue with Premiere, AME, and Photoshop since the update. Shared storage.

[Jim Curtis]

<div>I can only commiserate, because I’ve had a lot of crashes on quit, or won’t quit (goes into Not Responding) upon quitting Pr for the last several builds, and Ae slightly less.
</div><div>

Trashing prefs for Ae seems to have fixed that issue. I trash prefs on Pr so often that I’ve devised this trick to reset them quickly:

1. Find the folder where your Mac stores the Pr prefs: boot>Users>user>Documents>Adobe>Premiere Pro>14.0>Profile-user

2. Make an alias to this folder and put it on your Desktop.

3. Open the folder and trash the prefs: “Adobe Premiere Pro Prefs”

4. Launch Pr and create a new project.

5. Setup your prefs how you like them.

6. Quit Pr.

7. In the folder where the prefs reside, right-click the “Adobe Premiere Pro Prefs” file and Compress (archive) it, creating a zip file in the same folder.

8. When you start having problems with Pr – and you will – open this folder, trash the prefs, and unzip your “clean” version.

This method makes trashing prefs a pretty simple task. You will lose the list of Recent Projects, but that doesn’t bother me any.

I can’t say if trashing prefs will fix your problem, but it might. Some times, I go days without any issues in Premiere. Days!

One more thing: I try to remember to save before quitting Ae or Pr just in case the crash or hang happens before or simultaneous with saving the project.

</div>

[Oliver Peters]

My situation turned out to be a conflict with Dropbox. This is a bug confirmed Adobe that affects a few, but not all, users. In my case, the symptoms were that the 3 installed video apps (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder) would periodically spike memory use and nearly always require Force Quit to close the programs. It got worse with the 2021 updates. This was resolved by uninstalling the Dropbox application and deleting the Dropbox folder on my drive. So if you have these symptoms (not everyone will), follow those steps. It will probably be fixed in a future update, but I wasn’t given any sort of ETA. Hope that helps.

[Eric Santiago]

Thanks, Oliver.

Very helpful tip 🙂

[Robert Withers]

Thanks, Oliver. Coincidentally, I found the Dropbox app interfered with a wireless printer. Restarted the computer, quit Dropbox, and was able to print.

[Oliver Peters]

Unfortunately with Adobe, I tried just quitting Dropbox, but that didn’t help. I had to uninstall as well as delete the folder. Dropbox is very convenient for many, but it’s really not a great system.

[Graham Withers]

Great points Jim – I find Premiere looses touch with it’s supporting files sometimes – like when the Media Browser won’t load a project the only way to fix it is to force quite out of PPro.

@oliverpeters I’ve always assumed it was related to the way it sometimes can’t access an auto-save folder on my Dropbox or Google Drive.

When working with small teams, we used to save projects to Dropbox which was an easy work around for sharing work with assistants but this “lost linking” tendency quashed that a few years back.

Do you guys think they’re related?

[Oliver Peters]

In my case, I had no direct connection between Premiere or Dropbox. IOW, no auto-saves or anything directed to the Dropbox folder. Yet apparently it’s still something Premiere was looking at.