Premiere Pro is one of the most popular video editing programs in the world and part of the famous Adobe Suite of creative programs. However, as popular as it is, Premiere can be rather difficult to use at times, especially for beginners when it comes to debugging any random bugs or glitches that the program can throw your way at any time.
In this article, we’re talking about the “error retrieving frame” issue in Premiere, its causes and what you can do to fix the problem.
What causes this error?
The error is typically caused by conflicts between your renderer and Premiere which can cause errors when encoding video streams. Other common reasons include:
- Outdated GPU driver.
- Outdated Premiere version.
- Corrupt or damaged Premiere installation.
- Corrupt or damaged source files.
- Your system isn’t powerful enough to run Premiere or handle encoding/decoding of the media files in your project.
Also read: How to fix Premiere Pro error ‘There was an error decompressing audio’?
How to fix this?
Here are six fixes you can try out.
Restart your computer
Restarting your computer can often be the simplest solution when dealing with such errors. Rebooting your machine often fixes seemingly random issues, especially when dealing with hardware issues.
Update your GPU drivers
Outdated GPU drivers can also cause this issue in particular. While you should update all your drivers, take special care of your display drivers if you run into an error like this.
Step 1: Right-click Start and select Device Manager from the menu.
Step 2: Under Display Adaptors, find your graphics card’s name, right-click on it and click on Update Drivers.
Step 3: Click on Search automatically for drivers. Windows will then automatically look for and download the latest drivers for your particular GPU.
While this should help resolve the error, in case it doesn’t, click Uninstall device and restart your PC to force Windows to install the required drivers. You can then update them later. Alternatively, you can also remove your GPU and reinsert it if you can.
Update Premiere
Updating Premiere might also fix your issue. You can do this from the Creative Cloud dashboard by checking for any available updates. If there are any updates available, install them right away and restart Premiere to see if that fixes the problem.
Change the Premiere renderer
Changing the Premiere render engine to software only can also help resolve the error. Here’s how.
Step 1: Open Premiere, click on Edit, followed by Preferences and then Media.
Step 2: Uncheck any hardware encoding options.
Restart Premiere and the error should be gone.
Clear the media cache
A corrupt media cache is the cause of a lot of different headaches in the program. Try clearing it to see if that makes a difference.
Step 1: Open Premiere Pro and head over to Edit, followed by Preferences and then Media Cache.
Step 2: Under Media Cache, click the Delete button to clear out your media cache.
Now restart Premiere and it should work just fine. Alternatively, you can just rename the old media cache and let Premiere generate a new one.
Reinstall Premiere
Try reinstalling the software from scratch to fix your issues if nothing else works. Reinstalling Premiere is also rather easy, although we recommend you do it from the Creative Cloud panel and not through Windows settings.
All you have to do is open Creative Cloud. head over to All Apps and you’ll see Premiere listed below. Click the three horizontal dots next to it and select Uninstall. Once the uninstallation is complete, you can use the Creative Cloud panel to install Premiere again and hopefully resolve any issues you’re facing.
Also read: File type is unsupported compression type in Premiere Pro: 5 Fixes
