I don’t USUALLY share hot tips anymore, mostly because I don’t have any new ones, but I had a thing happen that I couldn’t find any documentation on, and I fixed two projects with this so far.

So you have a Premiere Pro CC sequence and it won’t render. You hit render and the number of frames remaining just keeps climbing like it’s insane, like “56 frames of 5768686 remaining” if you leave it long enough. The usual troubleshooting doesn’t work — importing the sequence to a new project, copying to a new sequence, trashing preferences, rendering small chunks.

Go to your sequence settings and change the codec being used to render video previews. Like if it’s iFrame Only MPEG, change it to ProRes or something. You’ll get a warning that says all the video previews must be deleted to do this. Say yes. Then you can switch it back if you want. Now it should render.

For some reason, deleting the video previews manually doesn’t really do the trick, either from the folder or from the drop down item. Neither does changing something in the sequence to force another render, like how FCP7 used to work. Forcing Premiere to delete the previews and redo them in this way is what does it. If there’s another way, or someone has success deleting the previews in another way, I’d be glad to share it in this post. But that’s what worked for me, so whatevs.

So there: Premiere Pro sequence won’t render, stuck in a render, infinite frames remaining, ta da.