I’ve received a lot of messages and emails regarding lag in Adobe Premiere Pro Cs4. Theirs some good and bad news with all of this. The good is that it can be resolved, the bad is that more than one thing could be causing it. Lag in Premiere Pro can be caused by various things from software to hardware issues. Below I’ll list some of the variables you may want to inquire into. I published a previous post that offered some tips on Premiere Pro, this one is dedicated to resolving issues of lag in the program. With that being said let’s begin!

1. Adjusting the frame rate of your project can greatly reduce any lag your experiencing. Click here for Adobe’s guide to adjusting the frame rate in Premiere Pro Cs4.

2. Check your memory also known as RAM. Adobe Premiere Pro is memory hungry as are a lot of the programs you’ll find in the Creative Suite. You need a minimum of 2gb of ram to run Premiere Pro. You can also do yourself a favor and close out some of the other programs your running while doing video editing.  For more information you can visit the Adobe Premiere Pro system requirements page here.

3. Check your scratch disk settings. I strongly recommend for anyone editing video to set a scratch disk away from your operating system. Think of it this way, your operating system is the software running all the time to let you accomplish all these tasks yet your working in the same area adding to the load; which can bog down the computer from running smoothly and cause lag. A solution to this is to partition your hard drive. When you partition your hard drive your separating a piece of the hard drive into another one. If you have a C drive now you can have another available drive with some of the free space in C. If you did this you would still have C & maybe the 2nd one would be called D etc etc… Meanwhile all your doing is allocating some extra space from C to a different area. When you partition your easing the load off your system and this is strongly suggested when working with graphic and video editing programs.

4. Make sure your editing a compatible video file. I’ve said this before but will say it again. If your working with video files that aren’t compatible with Premiere Pro your going to get horrible results. Google the type of video file your editing and try to look up the codec as well.

5. When previewing the video in premiere you have a window that shows you the video. 100 percent will be your clearest setting to view your video in the preview window. Because of resolution this can sometimes result in the video lagging. Try viewing the video at a smaller size to see if it runs smoother. Regarding hardware and editing video , a good video card and memory are two keys to reducing choppiness and lag on your computer. In this day and age if your serious about editing video on the computer it pays to invest in a solid machine that can perform.

6. Update your software. Adobe is pretty consistent in responding to user feedback on issues like this in the software and releases updates. I would run the updater to see if your using the latest version of the software. If you click up top on “Help” in Premiere you can find a selection that will let you check for updates.