[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!

[Dennis Dean]

I don’t do this but when clients ask I always advise them to test a few days ahead of time using the very same equipment they will be using when you play it back to an audience. If the equipment fails on the day of show because for some reason it doesn’t like ProRes (or whatever format) it doesn’t matter how good the quality of the video format is.

The best format is the one that will play properly on the playback equipment being used at that moment.

Having said that, ProRes is excellent. I think 422LT would be sufficient. I would think you should not use a proxy. I would also carry a couple of versions of Mp4 including something really light in terms of file size. It’s an excellent Distribution Codec. I’ve always considered ProRes an editing Codec.

[Dennis Dean]

Hey Rich,

Running a 2020 iMac with the 3.8 Gig 8 Core Intel i7 and Premiere 24.1

This is probably the fastest, smoothest version I’ve found. Every now and then when I’m deep into a menu, usually effects, I’ll click to modify a keyframe or size and it will freeze up. But that’s much rarer than it used to be. If it happens too often I tend to reboot the Mac in Safe mode, restart in regular mode and toss the Premiere prefs and settings and that usually takes care of it for quite a while.

[Dennis Dean]

All excellent idea from Mads.

Here’s one more I use – usually when I have a timeline that won’t render (rather than freezing) but it might be helpful to you.

If you’re always freezing in the same place – it could be a clip or other item your timeline doesn’t like. You can find it by rendering segments of the video until you find the half of the timeline that has a problem. Keep rendering each unrendered segment by half until, eventually, you’ll locate the clip, effect, etc. that’s causing the issue. Then swap it out for something different or create it separately, as a separate clip, and place the new copy back into the timelines. Again, this this is more for rendering issues but it might be helpful. Good luck!

[Dennis Dean]

Great advice – excellent ideas.

Thank you all!

I have my studies cut out for me…

Dennis

[Dennis Dean]

Thanks, Eric – I’ll start with Adobe. Otherwise the video might be telling me to start with a tool and I don’t even know what/where it is.

Appreciate!

[Dennis Dean]

I’m not a Windows user but an older Mac I used to run Premiere on booted one day and told me the graphics card needed updating. Didn’t need it so I haven’t done it. You might try updating firmware? Just a thought.

[Dennis Dean]

Thanks Rob,

Both good ideas. FB would be pretty easy. Hoping for a gizmo-gadget to attach to the camera or monitor output. Will explore a couple of other forums.

Dennis

[Dennis Dean]

I would get out of Premiere and record the track in Audition or the free app – Audacity. Export as a wave file and import into Premiere. Alt – open a new project in Premiere, record a few lines and see if you have the same problem. Export as WAV file and see if it sounds ok when played through another app, such as QuickTime. I don’t record directly into Premiere Pro. I used to use Audacity, now I use Audition. Both are excellent. Good luck!

[Dennis Dean]

Sometime with issues like this, I do everything needed to a copy of the source clip, then export as a new clip and swap it out with the original. If they’re the same file type you can add “old” to the name of the original, give the original name to the modified clip, save and reopen the project. Instant global swap!