White Screen in Premiere Pro: How Do You Fix It in 10 Seconds?

So you’re editing away in Premiere Pro and suddenly your preview window looks like a broken TV from 1997, just a staticky white screen of death staring back at you. 😤 You scrub through the timeline and maybe the picture flashes for a second, kind of shows but then it kind of goes away again, and you’re sitting there wondering if your project is corrupted or your GPU is dying.
I’ve been there. And I’m gonna show you exactly how to fix white screen in Premiere Pro without wasting your time. 👊

The fix takes about 10 seconds. Seriously.

The Fix: Change Your Renderer (3 Steps, 10 Seconds)

I’m not gonna give you a list of 15 things to try. I’m not gonna explain the history of GPU rendering pipelines. I’m not gonna waste any of your time. This is the fix that works for the vast majority of people dealing with this exact problem, and you can always come back for the other stuff later if you need it.

Step 1: Open Project Settings

Go to File in your top menu bar. Not Edit, not Premiere Pro preferences, File. This is a project-level setting, which is an important distinction because a lot of people go digging around in their general Premiere Pro preferences and wonder why they can’t find the right option.

From the File menu, click Project Settings, then click General. That’s the menu you want.

Step 2: Find the Renderer Dropdown

Once the Project Settings window opens, you’ll see a section right at the top called Video Rendering and Playback. There’s a dropdown labeled Renderer, and it’s probably set to something like “Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal)” on Mac or “Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)” on Windows with an NVIDIA card, or OpenCL if you’re on AMD. This dropdown is the key.

That “Recommended” label next to it? Yeah, it’s lying to you right now. Don’t trust it.

Step 3: Switch to Software Only

Click that dropdown and change it to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only. Hit OK. That’s it. Go check your preview window. Your footage should be back.

Why This Works (The 30-Second Version)

I said I wouldn’t waste your time with long technical explanations, and I meant it. But you probably want some idea of what just happened so here’s the short version. Here’s the quick why.

The Mercury Playback Engine is what Premiere Pro uses to render your video preview in real-time. When it’s set to GPU Acceleration, it offloads that rendering work to your graphics card for faster performance. The problem is that sometimes your GPU driver, your specific graphics card model, or even a particular combination of effects and codecs in your project creates a conflict that causes the renderer to basically choke and spit out that white static garbage instead of your actual footage.
It’s usually a driver conflict.

Switching to “Software Only” tells Premiere Pro to use your CPU instead of your GPU for rendering the preview. It sidesteps the GPU conflict entirely.

“Will My Editing Be Slower Now?”

Okay, the honest answer, maybe a little. When you switch to Software Only rendering, you’re asking your CPU to do work that your GPU is specifically designed to handle faster. So if you’re working with heavy 4K footage, lots of effects stacked up, color grading, that kind of thing, you might notice your playback isn’t quite as smooth. Performance can dip slightly.

But here’s my take: a slightly slower preview that actually works beats a GPU-accelerated preview that shows you a white screen of nothing. Every single time.

And for most projects, especially if you’re cutting together a standard edit without tons of heavy effects, you probably won’t even notice a difference. I’ve worked in Software Only mode for entire projects before and it was totally fine. Most edits won’t feel slower.

What If You Want GPU Acceleration Back Later?

Once you finish your project or Adobe pushes an update that fixes whatever driver conflict was causing the issue, you can absolutely switch back. Just go to File > Project Settings > General again and flip the renderer dropdown back to GPU Acceleration. It’s fully reversible.

Also worth mentioning, if you want to try fixing the GPU conflict itself rather than just working around it, updating your graphics card drivers is usually the move. NVIDIA users specifically should make sure they’re on the Studio Driver, not the Game Ready Driver.
Adobe has documented compatibility issues with Game Ready Drivers causing exactly this kind of rendering weirdness. Use the Studio Driver.

But that’s a rabbit hole for another day. Right now you just needed your preview back, and you’ve got it. Back to editing.

If the Fix Didn’t Work (Backup Options)

For the majority of people, changing the renderer fixes the white screen immediately. But if you’re not one of them, here are a couple more things to try before you start questioning your life choices: Try these next.

Clear your Media Cache. Go to Premiere Pro > Preferences > Media Cache (Mac) or Edit > Preferences > Media Cache (Windows) and click “Delete” next to Remove Media Cache Files. Corrupted cache files can cause all sorts of weird preview behavior and this is a commonly recommended troubleshooting step on Adobe’s own forums.

Reset your workspace. Go to Window > Workspace > Reset to Saved Layout. Sometimes the preview panel itself just gets into a weird state, and resetting the workspace layout snaps it back. This often fixes panel weirdness.

Create a new project and import. If nothing else works, create a brand new Premiere Pro project, then import your old project’s sequence into it. This can bypass project-specific corruption that no amount of settings changes will fix. It can bypass corruption.

Final Thoughts

Look, the Premiere Pro white screen of death is annoying but it’s not the end of the world. In most cases you’re literally three clicks away from fixing it: File > Project Settings > General, change the renderer to Software Only, hit OK.
Done. Your footage isn’t corrupted, your project isn’t broken, and your GPU probably isn’t dying.

If you wanna go deeper and try to get GPU Acceleration working properly again later, start with updating your graphics card drivers to the latest Studio Driver version and clearing your media cache. But for right now? You’ve got your preview back, and you can get back to actually editing. Which is the whole point.