[Michael Ron]

Great to hear, hopefully you can find a solution soon – Would love for you to come back and update the thread when you do, both to satisfy my own curiosity, but mostly for other users who might have similar issues in the future.

Good luck 🙂

[Michael Ron]

[Alexander Freedman] “So, I deleted all my scratch and media cache files and rolled back to PP2014. Same issue. Same crashing.”

From what you’re describing, if the problem persists in PP CS6 and CC14, this is not a CC15 issue but something on your machine causing the crashing.

You say CUDA is installed and up to date.. What about codecs?
You didn’t mention your footage codec details, but I know that on a PC, a lot of 4K footage often requires codecs or plugins to be imported properly. Did you install the relevant video codecs for your video?
If you didn’t, try googling ‘your camera name / codec + premiere pro import’ or something similar and see what comes up.

If I remember correctly you said you’re working of SSD’s but also have an external RAID? What happens if you try to use that instead of one of the internal SSD’s? And by that I mean putting your media and project file, as well as directing all your media cache and scratch files, to the external RAID, leaving nothing on the SSD – Just to make sure this isn’t a hardisk issue with one of your SSD drives.

[Alexander Freedman] “Could my RAM be bad? How would I know? I’m playing MMORPG games (like WoW, FFXIV, Elder Scrolls) just fine on this computer. Nothing else seems to be a problem. “

As far as your RAM, you are playing some relatively RAM intensive games, but these would still work while only utilising 8 or 12 GB of RAM, so it’s not really a definitive answer.
I know a software for mac that does hardware diagnostics, I’m sure there are similar softwares for Windows, but can’t really recommend anything specific.
If you feel comfortable with opening up your PC case, you can also verify this the old fashioned way – Depending on your RAM setup, try to remove half of it (e.g. if you have four 4GB chips, remove two of them, leaving 8GB inside) and boot your machine to verify it’s seeing 8GB of RAM.
Then try this again with different pairs – If one of your chips is defective, on one try your machine will most likely either not boot at all, or will only boot with 4GB of RAM.

However, since your CPU also seems to reach it’s cap – your issue might not be with RAM at all.. You’re saying the CPU also reaches 100% when playing video games, which AFAIK shouldn’t happen on an i7 with the type of games you play. Unfortunately CPU issues are harder to troubleshoot without additional hardware, but this sounds like it might be your issue.
It’s possible PPro has a “defence” mechanism designed to keep your machine from over-extending itself, where if your CPU and/or RAM hits a 100%, the software intentionally crashes.
I don’t know much about overclocking, but you might want to look at older posts on COW and Adobe forums that deal with OC and Adobe apps, e.g. this one:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1705192
You might find some helpful troubleshooting tips or better understanding of the inner-workings of PPro.

And another post that deals with RAM spikes in CC2015 you might also want to follow:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1705192

If I think of anything else I will let you know. In the meanwhile if you can’t find a solution, take advantage of the fact that your machine is new and try to take it in to the shop where you purchased it – If you really do have any defective hardware, they should be able to find and replace it for you.

[Michael Ron]

It’s possible you’re using a sequence preset that can only use AVI files for preview..
Can you take a screenshot of your sequence settings window?

You also mentioned your files are ProRes and you’re on a PC.. Do you have the ProRes codecs installed? Are you able to create a ProRes sequence?
I’m on a Mac so I’m not sure how Premiere handles ProRes on a PC, but AFIAK it should work either way as long as you have the codecs installed.

[Michael Ron]

The Mercury transmit is actually the “software-only” option, which is mostly meant for machines with unsupported GPUs that cannot utilise GPU rendering. I would suggest (after verifying on Nvidia’s site that your drivers are indeed updated), to try and switch to CUDA and see if that helps.

You can’t really compare 1080p files to 4K files.. The file amount might be the same, but the 4K files contain over 5 times the information an HD file has – Both because of the obvious difference in resolution and file size, and because of the codec/compression differences. 4K files are usually RAW or at the very least use an uncompressed codec which is highly intensive on your CPU and RAM.
However I still agree that it’s pretty wired. Your specs look like they should be good enough to play 4K files.. I would say RAM might be a bottleneck as far as editing goes, but would still expect it to work (maybe in half resolution for playback while editing).

If your machine is otherwise behaving normally (no crashing, other RAM-intensive softwares/games working well), than it’s most likely a software issue.
You can try clearing cache and importing the files a-few-at-a-time to see if that works.. But your best way to find a solution will be to eliminate some of the variables – You currently have a new computer with a new version of a newly installed software.. So it’s pretty hard to troubleshoot.

Since CC15 is very new, it’s possible this is a new import-related bug, or it can be something on your machine ..
Taking the files to a different machine is great, since you can know for sure the files themselves aren’t the issue.. But it still won’t tell you what the issue on your machine actually is.
If you can confirm the same files are working on your machine with CC14, that would mean this is related to CC15.. If they don’t work on CC14 either, but work on another machine, then at least you know this is for sure related to either faulty RAM or something in your OS (missing codecs, drivers, etc).
So I think in your case, if nothing else you can think of works, this might be a good step to take.. Even if it looks extreme, it can put your mind at ease as far as your hardware being fine and can get you closer to a solution.

Happy to help, hope you figure it out 🙂

[Michael Ron]

You can also just disable linked selection while you move the video clips to V2, than turn it back on when you’re done – That way your clips will still be selected and the keyboard shortcut will work, but you wont have to manually unlink and relink all your audio clips.

[Michael Ron]

Do you have the CUDA drivers installed? If so, try changing GPU acceleration to CUDA or Open-CL and see if that makes any difference for you.

I know you said the machine is new, but did you have CC2014 installed before you updated to CC2015? If you did, it might also be worthwhile to manually remove all your cache files and let PP recreate those.

It is possible that 16GB RAM is simply not enough for 4K editing, but AFAIK that you still shouldn’t see such a spike in RAM usage just for importing a few files.
If all else prevails, it might be worthwhile for you to roll back to CC2014 and see if you’re getting the same issues.. If everything works well in CC14, then you’ll at least know it’s not a hardware issue and you can then re-upgrade (or install CC15 without removing CC14), and continue troubleshooting.

[Michael Ron]

Are you working on a project you started on PP CC14, or is it a new project created in CC15?
Is your project using any special effects, plug-ins etc? And did you make sure the sequence settings match the source footage?

Try clearing your media cache manually:
1. inside PP navigate to Preferences > Media to see where your cache and cache database are saved
2. quit Premiere and navigate to these folders in the finder
3. delete all the files, relaunch PP and let it recreate the cache files.

Also, what graphic card do you have? Do you have the CUDA drivers installed? Are you using GPU acceleration at all (CUDA / Open CL)? And if you are, what happens if you switch to software-only?
Some people have reported CUDA issues after updating to CC15, but removing cache and updating the drivers worked for most.

[Michael Ron]

If you are on a mac, and don’t mind the file names changing, you can also do batch-renaming via Automator – that way you don’t need to wait for transcoding:
https://fellows.knightscience.org/tutorials/batch-rename-files-using-apple-automator/

In case you might need to refer to the original file names, copy the files to a new location before renaming them.

[Michael Ron]

What is your graphics card? Do you have CUDA (or drivers in general) installed and updated?

[Michael Ron]

If you go into Sequence > Sequence Settings, you can change the “Preview file format” at the bottom of the menu – I’m on a Mac so I’m happy using Quicktime ProRes, but you can change it to whatever format you like.
If you don’t tend to use your preview files on export, you can just test a few and use whatever format works best for you (good enough quality, small file size).

Note that after you do that, you’ll need to quit Premiere and manually navigate to your media cache location – remove all cache and render files, then relaunch Premiere to get it to recreate them.