Unlike most memory complaints on this blog, video editing is a case where very high memory numbers are often a genuine reflection of a genuinely demanding task, not purely a leak or inefficiency. That said, both apps have documented cases where usage grows well beyond what the project itself should require.
Why video editing is legitimately memory-hungry
A single frame of 4K footage is tens of megabytes uncompressed; a timeline with multiple layers of 4K or higher-resolution footage, effects, colour grades, and audio tracks needs to hold a meaningful working set of that data in memory to preview and scrub through smoothly. Both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve maintain caches of rendered previews specifically so playback doesn't require re-decoding footage from scratch on every frame, and those caches are deliberately memory-hungry by design, trading RAM usage for smoother scrubbing and playback.
What the real complaint threads describe
Adobe's own community forum has a thread titled plainly "Premiere Pro using too much memory 100GB+," describing RAM climbing past 100GB with a further 100GB+ in swap, and memory not being released between projects even after closing one and opening another, which suggests something beyond normal caching behaviour. Blackmagic's forum has a comparable thread describing DaVinci Resolve's memory climbing until it crashes, reported specifically on 64GB M1 Max machines, meaning the app was using memory well beyond the physical RAM installed via swap before failing.
What genuinely helps in Premiere Pro
Clear the media cache regularly. Preferences › Media Cache has a "Delete" option for cached files. Premiere's cache grows continuously across projects and isn't always cleared automatically between sessions.
Close projects you're not actively editing. If memory isn't fully released between projects as the forum reports suggest, keeping only your current project open, rather than several in different windows, limits how much accumulated cache is in play at once.
Lower your preview resolution while editing. Editing at Quarter or Half resolution instead of Full reduces the memory needed for real-time playback significantly, only rendering at full quality for final export.
What genuinely helps in DaVinci Resolve
Adjust the cache settings under Playback › Render Cache. Resolve lets you control how aggressively it caches rendered frames; a more conservative cache setting trades some scrubbing smoothness for a smaller memory footprint.
Use optimized/proxy media for editing. Generating lower-resolution proxy files for your source footage and editing against those, then relinking to full-resolution media only for final render, is Resolve's own recommended workflow for exactly this kind of memory pressure on large projects.
When high memory use is a genuine sign of a problem
The line between "video editing legitimately uses a lot of memory" and "something is wrong" is whether usage keeps climbing well beyond what your actual project size would explain, especially between projects or after closing and reopening a timeline. If memory doesn't drop noticeably after closing a project entirely, that points toward the kind of not-fully-released memory the Adobe forum thread describes, rather than expected caching behaviour.
Where a memory-relief tool fits in
Neither Premiere Pro's nor Resolve's own working memory during an active edit is something a general tool should try to reclaim; that memory is legitimately supporting the task you're doing. Where Shiny helps is between editing sessions and for everything else running alongside your editor: browser tabs, Slack, email, and other apps that add up while a resource-heavy editing app is also open. Freeing that up in one click gives your editing software more headroom to work with, without touching the cache or project data it's actively using.
For a look at a related demanding creative app, see the Lightroom RAM usage guide, and Photoshop on 8GB Macs for realistic expectations on lower-memory machines.
How much RAM do you actually need for video editing?
For 1080p editing with modest effects, 16GB is workable, though 32GB gives noticeably more comfortable headroom for smooth scrubbing. For 4K editing with colour grading and multiple layers, 32-64GB is a realistic working range for most freelance and prosumer work. Professional workflows involving 6K/8K footage, heavy VFX compositing, or multiple simultaneous streams commonly push into the 64-128GB range, which is exactly the segment Apple's M5 Max chip with its 128GB ceiling is aimed at. If you're regularly seeing the kind of 100GB+ figures described in the forum threads above on a machine with meaningfully less physical RAM than that, you're seeing swap-driven slowdown and crash risk, not smooth performance, regardless of what the software is technically capable of handling.
A sensible workflow habit that avoids most of this
Beyond the specific cache and proxy settings above, the single habit that avoids the worst of these reports is treating your project file the way you'd treat any other resource-heavy task: close it fully when you're done for the day rather than leaving the app open with the project loaded indefinitely, and restart the editing app itself periodically during a long multi-day project rather than assuming it will manage its own memory perfectly across an entire week of continuous use. Neither app is designed with the expectation that it stays open uninterrupted for days at a time.