Adobe Premiere Pro keeps crashing on your Windows computer / laptop? You’re not alone. Although it’s frustrating, the good new is you’ve come to the right place, and after reading this article, you should be able to fix Premiere Pro crashing issue on your own easily.
Although the causes of this issue vary, here we’ve put together some fixes that proved working for many Windows Premiere Pro users. Whether Premiere Pro crashes on startup or crashes when it is rendering media, you can find a fix to try in this article.
Try these fixes
- Update your graphics driver
- Reset your preferences
- Turn off GPU Acceleration
- Remove media cache files
- Close CPU/memory hogging applications
- Check for overheating components
- Update / reinstall Premier Pro
Fix 1: Update your graphics driver
In most cases, the broken or outdated graphics driver is the main culprit behind the Premiere Pro crashing issues.
If you haven’t updated your graphics driver for a long time, or if the graphics driver file is broken or corrupted, you may suffer from the program crashing, stuttering, and even screen flickering issues.
Graphics card manufacturers like Nvidia, AMD and Intel keeps updating their graphics drivers. By doing that, they’ll fix bugs in the last version of graphics driver and enhance the graphics card performance. Sometimes, they also provides support for the new features in creative applications. For example:
The March NVIDIA Studio Driver provides optimal support for the latest AI-powered features in creative applications including Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve 17.
In other words, the latest graphics driver will unlock the full potential of your graphics card and give you a better experience for creating and gaming.
There’re mainly two ways you can update your graphics drivers:
Option 1: Manually
You’ll need some computer skills and patience to update your drivers this way, because you need to find exactly the right the driver online, download it and install it step by step.
Your graphics card manufacturer keeps updating drivers. To get them , you need to go to the website of your graphics card manufacturer:
Then find the graphics driver corresponding with your specific flavor of Windows version (for example, Windows 64 bit) and download the driver manually.
Once you’ve downloaded the correct drivers for your system, double-click on the downloaded file and follow the on-screen instructions to install the driver.
Or
Option 2: Automatically (Recommended)
This is the quickest and easiest option. It’s all done with just a couple of mouse clicks – easy even if you’re a computer newbie.
If you don’t have the time, patience or computer skills to update the graphics driver manually, you can do it automatically with Driver Easy.
Driver Easy will automatically recognize your system and find the correct drivers for it.
You don’t need to know exactly what system your computer is running, you don’t need to risk downloading and installing the wrong driver, and you don’t need to worry about making a mistake when installing.
You can update your drivers automatically with either the FREE or the Pro version of Driver Easy. But with the Pro version it takes just 2 clicks:
- Download and install Driver Easy.
- Run Driver Easy and click the Scan Now button. Driver Easy will then scan your computer and detect any problem drivers.
- Click Update All to automatically download and install the correct version of all the drivers that are missing or out of date on your system.
(This requires the Pro version – you’ll be prompted to upgrade when you click Update All. If you don’t want to pay for the Pro version, you can still download and install all the drivers you need with the free version; you just have to download them one at a time, and manually install them, the normal Windows way.)
You need to restart your PC after you finished updating your graphics driver.
Launch Premiere Pro to see if it crashes or not. Normally, after you updated the graphics driver, the crashing issue will disappear.
If the latest graphics driver fails to stop the crash, just read on to try the next fix, below.
Fix 2: Reset your preferences
According to Adobe, resetting your preferences is a useful fix to stop Premiere Pro from crashing. If you haven’t tried this fix yet, just give it a shot.
It’s quite easy to reset your preferences. Here’s how:
- Hold the Alt key when you click to launch Premiere Pro. This will invoke a popup asking if you want to reset your preferences.
- Click OK to confirm.
See if the Premiere Pro crashing issue persists. If this fix doesn’t stop the crashing, don’t worry. Try the next fix, below.
Fix 3: Turn off GPU acceleration
GPU acceleration is one of the common causes of Premiere Pro crashing. If you’ve turned on GPU acceleration, temporarily disable it to see if you can fix Premiere Pro crashing. Here is how to do it:
- Launch Premiere Pro and go to File > Project Settings > General.
- In the Video Rendering and Playback part, set Renderer option to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only. Click OK to save the change.
See if Premiere Pro crashes after you switched GPU acceleration to Software Only. Usually, Premiere Pro may take more time to finish rendering after you disabled GPU acceleration, but it would reduce the frequency of random crashes.
If this fix doesn’t work, try the next fix, below.
Fix 4: Remove media cache files
Some corrupted media cache files may also trigger Premiere Por crashing issue. If it’s the case, you need to remove media cache files. Here is how to do it:
- Launch Premiere Pro and go to Edit > Preferences > Media Cache.
- Click the Delete… button to remove media cache files.
See if this fix stops the crashing. If not, try the next fix, below.
Fix 5: Close CPU / memory hogging applications
Premiere Pro is a resource intensive application. If you’re running lots of applications at the same time in the background, your computer may run out of RAM and causes Premiere Pro to crash. If it’s the case, closing those CPU / memory hogging applications may get Premiere Pro work again, Here is how to do it:
- On your keyboard, press Ctrl, Shift and Esc at the same time to open Task Manager. You will be prompted for permission. Click Yes to open Task Manager.
- Select any other applications and programs that take up a large amount of CPU or memory, then click End task to close it.
If Premiere Pro works well after you closed those CPU / memory hogging applications, congratulations!
To prevent Premiere Pro from crashing due to insufficient memory in the future, you may need to consider upgrading the memory (RAM) on your computer.
Fix 6: Check for overheating components
Premiere Pro utilizes both CPU and GPU to perform heavy computations. If Premiere Pro runs on your computer for a long time, your computer may get overheated, especially when its cooling system is not working properly. Once your computer got overheated, Premiere Pro may crash without warning. If it’s the case, you need to cool your computer down.
To cool down your computer, you may need to
- Clean the dust from the fans and vents of your computer.
- Make sure your computer is in a cool environment.
- Use a better cooling system for your computer if yours is not powerful enough.
Fix 7: Update / reinstall Premier Pro
If none of the fixes works, try updating / reinstalling Premier Pro. Normally, after updating Premier Pro to the latest version, or reinstalling it, you’ll fix the crashing issue.
Conclusion
In most cases, keeping Premier Pro, Windows OS and drivers up to date would get rid of most program crashing issues. If these common fixes on this article didn’t help you fix the Premiere crashing issue, you can also try investigating Windows crash logs to analyze and troubleshoot the causes of the crash. For more details, see the article: How to view crash logs in Windows 10.
Hopefully, this article helped you fixed Premier Pro crashing issue. If you have any questions or suggestions on this topic, feel free to leave us a comment below. Thanks for reading!