Adobe premiere cs6 suddenly EXTREMELY slow and CPU intensive

Question

Hi everyone,
I'm editing candon 5d mk III footage (h.264 files) on my late 2011 MacBook pro. Here are the specs..
240 gig SanDisk SSD harddrive (190 gigs free)
500 Gig (250 gigs free)
8 gigs ram
2.4 ghz i5 processor
Intel HD graphics 3000 graphics card
I'm a wedding videographer and I am currently closing my last edits of the season. I have edited 20+ 45 minute videos on Adobe Premiere CS6 and have had absolutely no issues at all. I enjoy working on premiere so much that I've been trying to get my videographer friends to give a shot and simplify their workflows.
Upon starting my second to last edit (same process as the other 18 videos I've done this season, organizing the footage within it's respective folder, loading it into premiere with the couples' choice in music and opening 4-5 new sequences based on the events of the day) I noticed that I was having a lot of trouble importing folders into my media bin. I had to import all of the footage unorganized because loading the folders "Preperation, Ceremony, Photos, Reception" with the footage within them would cause premiere to freeze and become unrepsonsive. So, finding no solution I added all the footage in no particular fashion. Just one large unorganized group. Then, while organizing the files into bins, I noticed even the smallest move would take several minutes to complete. Because I was working directly off of my hard drive I figured these kinds of delays would eventually catch up to me, so I moved all of my files to my HDD and decided to work on them there. The project itself continued to be extremely slow and started crashing regularly (especially when applying audio effects). After a few hours, I stopped being able to play 1080p video at all. It would jam and stutter so often it become unuseable. 720p video was the next to go along with my ability to render anything in less than 30 minutes - 1 hour. At last attempt to use premiere I was getting an "Unable to compile movie - Unknown Error" message when trying to render alpha channel things (lower third titles and things of the nature), my ability to change the resolution of the playback had disappeared (Going from full, 1/2 and 1/4 did nothing, it just remained at full quality) and finally doing anything in premiere caused it to use 300% of my CPU (based off of my Activity Monitors metering).
Does anybody have any clue as to what could be happening to my machine/program? I have a yearly subscription to adobe's creative cloud service if that helps. Oh and I've tried moving my media cache's from my HDD to my SDD with little or no results. Don't know if that helps.
Thank you to anyone who helps in advance. What I believe to be clean installs aren't doing anything so I'm hoping somebody can give me a hand.

Answer 1

Sounds to me like specific media is dragging the Mac to a halt. (300%, really Apple? Isn't that like saying that my car can go up to 90mph, but last night I drove it at 300% speed, 270mph)
Some things to trouble shoot:
Do you have any assets in the project that are loaded directly from strange devices, like a SD card or CD audio? Any dynamic link media that may be problematic?
Is there anything that makes this footage different than footage from successful projects?
Can you work successfully with an old project?
Can you successfully start a new project using different or less media?
Is the 500 GB drive internal or external?
One time I was sent out at from work to troubleshoot a system that would freeze up like yours. The guy was an idiot and rude client that demanded that someone from our facility help him fix his own project. He said that he had been troubleshooting for a day, and then had convinced his organization's IT guy that he needed a way over spec new pc to run Premiere.
His system was fine. Within 3 minutes of checking media in his project, I saw that top track of the problem sequence had a video clip that was set to a speed of .01%, and he had the clip stretched for 24hours in the sequence. His project was supposed to be a 2 minute PSA. All his issues went away after removing the idiotic Day Long slow motion clip. He complained to my boss because I had laughed at him.
I relate that story to illustrate that it could be a weird thing with you media or fx, just as well as a hardware or software issue.
Good Luck