Ugh, I totally feel you on the Premiere crashes. Honestly, Adobe has been such a letdown lately. I had the same issue with the captions freezing everything up last month... it is just not as good as I expected for the price. For your budget and that Friday deadline, I would skip the Adobe headache and use Descript Creator Plan 1-User Subscription. It lets you edit video just by deleting text and the captions are way more reliable than premieres mess. It is only like 15 bucks a month, which is way cheaper than what you are paying now. Another solid move is CapCut Desktop Pro Annual Version. The AI captions are basically instant and it actually runs on a normal laptop without exploding. I switched most of my small business client work there because I was tired of wasting time on tech support... it just works.

Honestly, most of these newer AI tools are kinda a mess for serious work.

• CapCut Desktop Pro Subscription is super fast for captions, but the privacy policy makes me really nervous.
• Runway Gen-2 Standard Plan has wild AI features but unfortunately its not as good as expected for long projects. I had issues with both crashing lately... reliability and safety just arent there yet.

I have been editing for over a decade and honestly, I went through that exact same phase about two years ago. I was working on a massive project and the captioning tools kept hanging at 98% every single time. It is literally a nightmare when you have a deadline on Friday. My fix was basically a shift in how I view the hardware-software relationship. I realized that my old rig just couldnt handle the localized processing that these modern apps demand. Here is what I learned during that transition:

• Moving to a high-memory setup like the Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max 16-inch 64GB RAM basically solved the thermal issues.
• I stopped trying to do everything in one suite and started using more stable hardware to offload the tasks.
• Switching to an external drive like the Samsung T7 Shield 2TB Portable SSD for cache files kept my main system from freezing. The DIY vs professional service thing is a big factor too. Sometimes it is cheaper to pay a pro captioner than to lose a client because your software is dying. I have learned the hard way that fighting with software for six hours is way more expensive than just paying for a service to handle it for you. Sometimes you just gotta step away from the machine and let someone else do the grunt work. Its basically about protecting your sanity at that point.

I swapped to a cheaper monthly setup and honestly love it, its amazing! My old rig didnt handle the load at all... what resolution are you usually shooting in tho?

> honestly im so done with premiere pro crashing every single time i try to use the auto-caption feature I totally get that frustration. In my experience, Adobe still struggles with how it offloads AI tasks to the GPU. For years I dealt with those memory leaks during long transcriptions until I finally switched workflows. If you want something that actually utilizes your hardware properly, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Studio 19 is basically the gold standard now. It uses the DaVinci Neural Engine which is light years ahead of Adobes Sensei for stability. The way it handles auto-captions and audio isolation is just... cleaner. It actually leverages the Tensor cores on your card instead of just spiking your RAM until it dies. Its a one-time fee, but it fits your budget long-term. If you need something cheaper and faster for that Friday deadline, honestly Wondershare Filmora 13 Perpetual License has surprisingly good AI tracking and captioning tools that dont hog resources. Its been a lifesaver for my smaller quick-turnaround projects lately.