How to Fix Laggy Audio in Premiere Pro

How to Fix Laggy Audio in Premiere Pro

Is your audio in Premiere Pro lagging? If so, there are a few simple things you can do to try to fix this issue.

First of all, ask yourself if this just started happening or if this has always happened. If your Premiere Pro has always done this, then your computer specs may just be too low. If you’re confident that you have a powerful computer, and this is just a temporary glitch, then there are a few ways to try to fix the issue.

Watch the full tutorial here:

The first thing you’ll want to do is completely close Premiere Pro, then re-open the program and see if the issue was fixed simply by restarting.

After reopening Premiere, see if you can identify any problem areas. Above the timeline, you will see a colored line. Green means that section is fully rendered, yellow is video without a preview file that can likely be played back in real time, and red is video without a preview file that likely cannot be played back in real time. These are just guesses, and a more powerful computer may be able to play through the yellow and red footage just fine. But to be safe, you should render your timeline. Click on sequence, then click on Render In to Out. Depending on your render hardware, this might only render the red sections, but those are a likely source of problems. Now when you play back your timeline, see if you still have the audio lag. Note that if you make any changes to a rendered section, the entire section will become unrendered again.

Next up, you should lower the playback resolution. If your computer is struggling to play your video and audio in sync, then it’s possible that the video files are just too large. Lower the playback quality by clicking on the dropdown menu.

You can also right-click on the program monitor and make sure that High Quality Playback is deselected.

Using proxies of your video files is another popular way to deal with large video files that are struggling to play back. Click on file, project settings, ingest settings, and select the ingest box. Click on Copy and Create Proxies, and now any video files that you import will come with a lower-quality proxy version. These proxies are great because they’re easier to play, and you’re probably never taking advantage of full 4K resolution when you’re editing in the small program monitor. Once your proxies are processed, you’ll need to go into your project panel options and click on Metadata Display. On the list of options, toggle on Proxy File Name and Proxy File Location to see the proxy information in your project panel. To enable your timeline to be edited with proxies, simply click the Toggle Proxies button under the program monitor window. If you don’t see this button, click on the plus sign to add more buttons, and find the Toggle Proxy button there. Once toggled on, the original files in your timeline will be switched over to their proxy files.

If none of that worked, then you should clear your cache.

To delete the cache, open Premiere Pro without opening up a project, then click on Edit, then Preferences, then Media Cache. You’ll see a Remove Media Cache Files button. Clicking the delete button will pop up another window that asks whether you’d like to delete unused media cache files or all media cache files. The first option only deletes files that can no longer be found in projects, so that’s not what we want. Deleting all media cache files will actually delete all of the files, so select this to clear your cache completely.

If you can’t open Premiere Pro, you can manually delete the media cache by navigating to its file location. Here are the default locations, but if you’ve changed this location you’ll need to remember where you set it.

Then there’s always the nuclear option, which is to uninstall and reinstall Premiere Pro. You shouldn’t have to do this, but if everything else fails it may be worth a try.

We hope very much that at least one of these tips helped your laggy audio issues. Premiere Pro can be a complex beast, and sometimes as an editor you may want to push your computer too far. But even with lower-end hardware, you can get a lot done with this software. If you want to see more Premiere Pro tips, be sure to subscribe to FilterGrade. We’ll see you in the next video!

View next: How to Clear Your Cache in Premiere Pro

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