When an application starts acting weird, one of the best ways to reset it, before you call tech support, is to trash its preference files.
With Final Cut in Lion, you need to find a hidden folder and trash two files. Recent versions of Premiere Pro make this much easier. Here’s the secret:
When launching Premiere Pro from either a Mac or PC, hold down two keys while launching. This automatically throws away Premiere’s preferences.
In both cases, continue holding the keys until the splash screen appears. You will know you successfully trashed preferences when the splash screen doesn’t have projects listed.
19 Responses to Premiere Pro: Trash Preferences
Newer Comments →-
Philip Ohler says:
May 21, 2012 at 5:34 am
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Phil K says:
May 21, 2012 at 8:29 am
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Trevor says:
July 28, 2012 at 1:03 am
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Salwa says:
October 1, 2012 at 6:34 am
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Larry Jordan says:
October 1, 2012 at 8:03 am
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Andrew Sorlie says:
October 25, 2012 at 11:40 am
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Kelly says:
January 31, 2013 at 4:08 pm
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Clark says:
July 20, 2013 at 8:23 pm
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Steven says:
January 29, 2014 at 9:55 pm
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Jeffrey says:
August 5, 2014 at 8:34 pm
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Eurekam says:
October 16, 2014 at 2:23 am
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Bill says:
August 11, 2016 at 6:34 am
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Larry says:
August 11, 2016 at 7:21 am
Newer Comments →I recommend Digital Rebellion’s free Preferences Manager.
Makes dealing with preference issues with many apps much easier.
http://www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/
Larry,
Thanks for helpful tip. I was never quite sure about locked prefs in Mac Pro Library, this takes care of any question. And I have had issues capturing with Canon GL2 and Lion with Premiere Pro 5.5 needing the use of such a technique for prefs.
That was easy, the only thing where did I save the project 🙂 It’s fine.
Sweet.
Can you explain why/how the process of trashing preferences makes thing right? What is going on behind the scenes?
Thanks! Salwa
Salwa:
Preference enable an application to understand the world around it. When preferences get corrupted, which has nothing to do with how you are using the program, trashing preferences resets the program back to its factory defaults. In many case, this is all that is needed to fix an application that is misbehaving.
Larry
Thank you for this very simple, but very useful article. I appreciate your writing – i’ve benefited from your insights for 4 years now. Thank you.
This saved me so much time trying to figure out what was wrong!
What does and doesn’t get reset when I trash my prefs? Will I lose all of my hard work building my custom keyboard shortcuts and workspaces (i.e. panel layouts)? I’ve also created a few favorite effects, title styles and effect presets. Will I lose those, too?
Thanks for this useful tip…
Larry – always the life saver: Missing audio waveform in Premiere Pro CC timeline that happened halfway through a project. After digging around on the web for over an hour I found this post – fixed! Thanks.
Life saver…Yes. Saved by your trick just after the PPRO 8.1 update… ! Best regards
I did this when opening up a project and it deleted all of my video files just leaving this empty box with a question mark.
23 hours of work gone!!!
Bill:
Hmmm… Deleting preferences doesn’t delete files, but it does delete lists of most recently opened files.
If media has gone offline, there is something else wrong with your system, but deleting preferences didn’t do it. Please contact Adobe Support and have them help you figure out what’s happening with your system.
Larry