Here’s how to get the best performance in Adobe Premiere Pro

Before doing anything in Premiere Pro, you need to make sure you’re using GPU-accelerated rendering. You can find this in your Project Settings under the General section. For the Renderer, make sure you’re using the one that says “GPU acceleration.” The actual hardware acceleration will differ depending on your GPU, but Premiere Pro supports Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Apple GPUs.

This GPU acceleration works on effects on your timeline, utilizing your GPU to speed up the effects rather than relying on your CPU. Premiere Pro can also leverage your GPU for other tasks, including hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding for H.264 and H.265 formats.

Hardware-accelerated decoding is a big deal for timeline performance. To turn it on, head into your Preferences and go down to the Media section. In this window, check the Enabled hardware accelerated decoding box. If you have a CPU with integrated graphics, you can check it here, along with your discrete GPU. Restart Premiere, and you’re good to go.

That’s hardware-accelerated decoding, but what about encoding? This will speed up your export times out of Premiere. Head to the Export view in Premiere Pro and select Hardware encoding under the Encoding settings sections to enable it. You’ll find these same options if you send your export over to Adobe Media Encoder.

Premiere Pro maintains a media cache. This is a spot on your hard drive where it stores files that Premiere Pro needs to run, such as the .pek files that contain audio waveform information. Whenever you import files into Premiere, some data is stored in the cache to speed up performance. The problem is that the cache can get too full, and it can actually have an adverse effect on performance.

Thankfully, you can clear the cache from within Premiere. Head into your Preferences window and select Media cache. There, you can select Delete to clear the cache. You can also change the cache location here if you have a separate hard drive with more space. Deleting your cache won’t delete the media files you’re using. If there are media files you’re still working with, Premiere Pro will just need to rebuild the cache for those files.

You can do this process manually, but it’s much easier to set up Premiere to automatically delete cache files. Under Media cache management, you can tell Premiere to automatically delete files either after a certain number of days or when files exceed a certain size.

Adobe recommends you store your media cache on an SSD or NVMe drive, and “ideally on a dedicated drive.” A fast SSD ensures Premiere can quickly read the cache, and spreading out the cache from the drive where you’re storing the project keeps the strain on the drive low. These are advance optimization steps you can take, but they aren’t required.

Working with modern video files in Premiere is tough if you don’t have a beefy computer. 8K video files, RAW files, and HDR content can easily bog down your workflow, but you don’t need to edit your actual video with these files. Instead, you can attach proxies. Proxies in Premiere Pro allow you to edit with lower quality versions of your video files to better timeline performance. Premiere Pro links the proxies to the original files, so you’ll still get all of the quality when you export your edit.

The quick way to make proxies is to select all of your imported files in Premiere Pro, right-click, and select Create proxies. You have options for the quality and codec, and once that’s done, Premiere will send the files to Media Encoder. provide them out, then head back to Premiere and select the Toggle proxies button under your preview window (pictured below). There you have it; you’re using proxies.

That’s the quick and easy way to use proxies, but what if you always want to use proxies? You can set that up. Open your Project Settings and head to the Ingest settings tab. Check the Ingest box to turn on automatic ingest behavior. Then, from the dropdown, select Create proxies. You can also select the proxy destination if you want to store them in a location different from your main media.

With this, Premiere will automatically load up Media Encoder to create proxies every time you import video files. You’ll want to leave proxies on while editing for the best performance — but keep the Toggle proxies button handy. You’ll want to use the full media file for things admire checking files for focus or color adjustments.

One of the most powerful things you can do to better Premiere Pro performance is provide your effects. Premiere Pro doesn’t provide anything in your timeline while you’re editing. It all happens in real-time, so if you go from a basic video clip to something with heavy visual effects, you’ll notice a slowdown in playback speed. Thankfully, you can provide these clips and substitute them on your timeline to better playback.

In Premiere, you’ll see a green bar above your timeline. Spots that are red show areas where Premiere Prow will struggle to playback the video, usually in areas where you have multiple effects applied to your videos. Select the clip you want to provide below this red line and pick Clip in the top menu. There, you can select provide and substitute. 

The critical setting you want to check here is Include video effects. This will provide out the clip with the effects on top of it, essentially making it a new video file. You won’t be able to edit the effects after you provide the clip, but it will make timeline performance much smoother.

You don’t want to do this for all of your footage; apply it where timeline performance slows. And, if you need to make changes or you’re ready to export, you can restore the original clip by selecting it, choosing Clip at the top of the screen, and pick Restore unrendered. 

For our reviews, we use PugetBench for Premiere Pro, a free Premiere Pro benchmark you can run on your system and differentiate the results to other machines. Unfortunately, the final result is just a number, so it doesn’t tell you much about how it actually feels to use Premiere. In addition, the scope of your project will largely establish your performance. Editing a small video for Instagram is fine on a budget laptop without a GPU, but your timeline would barely function if you were editing a full-length movie on the same machine.