6 Ways to Optimize Premiere Pro’s performance

Adobe Premiere Pro is one of the best editing programs out there. The usability, the interface and the power of Premiere Pro are incredible, but even Premiere Pro is susceptible to slow performance at times.

Do you need to make a real quick edit? Is Premiere Pro being a bit sluggish? So how do I optimise Premiere Pro’s performance? Don’t worry! Here are a few tips and tricks to optimise Premiere Pro’s performance in no time:

How to optimize Premiere Pro’s performance:

1. Point the media cache to another drive

The media cache is probably pointing to your OS drive at the moment. This is not optimal for Premiere Pro’s performance. You want the OS drive to be focusing on a separate drive, it’s best to point at an external drive as this will help it to cache much more efficiently.

Simply go to Preferences > Media Cache – then change the drive it points too.

2. Disable your clips when you’re not using them

All the tracks added to your timeline are enabled at all times unless you say otherwise. This means it’s using up a lot of CPU and will negatively affect your performance. To stop this simply highlight the clips you are not working on and disable them. It will stop your computer previewing them and using up additional performance power.

*To quickly enable/disable simply hold down cmd+shift+e – for MAC, or ctrl+shift+e for Windows.

3. Make sure GPU Acceleration is turned on

A lot of the effects in Adobe Premiere Pro require the GPU acceleration to render correctly. If this isn’t switched on you’ll find the playback stutters or you’ll get the warning showing a lengthy playback time.

4. Create a proxy version

When editing in Adobe Premiere Pro you can set proxy versions. This is to create a smaller version of your video, for example, a 480p version instead of the full resolution of the vide (1080p).

5. Reduce the playback resolution

By reducing the resolution of your playback version it will help speed up the usability of Premiere Pro and also the playback speed. Even after making a couple of the optimisations, you may find the playback speed is a little laggy in Premiere Pro, but there is an easy fix to this.

On your playback screen select the “Playback resolution” tab and move it from full resolution to 1/2 or a 1/4. It will look a 1/2 or 1/4 of the quality but will play so much quicker, and this is strictly for editing purposes – the export will still be at the highest imaginable quality.

6. Edit in a sequence that matches the footage settings

Premiere Pro works efficiently when you preview a sequence in its native property settings.

To do this, add your clip to the timeline and click the clip. Scroll down and select “new sequence from clip”, it will then create a sequence that matches the correct codec, resolution and frame rate.

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We hope this helped you speed up Premiere Pro! For more editing tips and tricks – Check out our YouTube channel here, we upload every week with filmmaking tutorials or check out our dedicated Adobe Premiere Pro page for more tips and resources.