OS Updates

[Rob Ainscough]

I’d wait until you finish the project. Upgrading any OS (be it Apple or Windows) will only make matters worse not better in terms of problem diagnostics … even more so if you already have a problem.

Did you recently do any Adobe Pr updates? Sadly Adobe is notorious for buggy updates.

Is your Mac having any issues with other software (not Adobe)? Stability problems can also be a result of your hardware so I’d recommend running some testing tools for your Mac to load it and see how well it performs.

[Robert Gilbert]

Thanks so much, Rob! Does that go for updates, as well (as opposed to upgrades)?

[Dennis Dean]

Never buy a product with a serial number of “1”.

Following that advice, I tend to stay a couple of iterations behind in everything, while the bugs are worked out.

Don’t start changing in things in mid-project is excellent advice.

I’d recommend clearing your cache, resetting your preferences and making sure you have plenty of extra space on your hard drive. Plan on leaving 15-20% of your drive vacant. I also sometimes do a Safe Mode Start of my Mac, then restart. The shutdown in Safe Mode is supposed to initiate some repairs. And speaking of repairs, might not hurt to run drive repair but be sure you save the entire project off to another drive before you do that. And if you can do it – run as clean as possible keeping only the applications you absolutely need. I run Premiere Pro and Photoshop together a lot. Whenever I open Illustrator – I’m almost guaranteed a crash. Adobe has never gotten that partnership correct – and I have no idea whether it’s Illustrator of the OS or my hardware, as I’ve changed versions of the OS and Illustrator several times. You might also want to keep a log (use pencil and paper) of what you were doing the moment you had a problem.

Others in this forum should have more advice. Good luck!

[Robert Gilbert]

Thank you very much, Dennis.

[Tom Morton]

This is a big bugbear for me, the updates (and upgrades) are generally buggy and cause a problem somewhere. I have all the auto-updates turned off for anything Adobe, just because I can’t risk getting bugs that make it impossible to work.

The only time I update is when I have a problem. Whenever I look at the new features listed in the updates, there’s almost never any features that seem useful to me, certainly nothing that makes me want to update to a potentially buggy version that hasn’t been tried and tested properly. Most features seem to be something like “we’ve added an AI chatbox so that if you don’t know what an MP4 file is, you can now find the answer through AI without leaving Premiere Pro” – for the last few years, adobe have focused on providing features for new and inexperienced users to dampen the learning curve for them.

When I do have an issue, I manually update to the next version on from what I’m working with (not the latest version). Good advice from the others not to do this mid project. I also tend to run both versions for a couple of months (there’s an option box to uninstall previous versions when updating which I keep off) until the new version has bedded in.

Call me paranoid, but I’ve had my workflow upset plenty of times due to Premiere Pro playing up.

[Robert Gilbert]

Thank you very much, Tom.

[Eric Santiago]

I love formatting my OS drive at least once a year 🙂

[Robert Gilbert]

Thanks, Eric!

[Eric Santiago]

Honestly everyone’s reply here is valid and sadly its a PITA to deal with Premiere as far as updates go.

I use all four NLEs so its a crazy game I play at home and work.

Just lucky to have a few backup systems just in case.

[Robert Gilbert]

Actually I have experienced some erratic behavior in Premiere: the timeline changing and suddenly playing back rapidly, disappearance of assets and even sequences from the Project panel, etc.

One Adobe agent advised me: “if you do not update your Mac your hardware drivers will not get updated and the performance will degrade for your Mac also you have an M1 chip that needs to be up to date for best performance and Premiere Pro uses M1 chip as it acts as a CPU & GPU both and if the drivers for that is not updated it might cause performance issues with the application.”

But I’m wary of updates. Please tell me what you think of that agent’s reply. Thanks!