I may have determined what the issues was... even w/ our brand new iMac with awesome video card, it seems that the way abobe premiere was causing the CPU to overheat and shutdown constantly, we're running into a processing capacity issue to parse the video clips and render over 100 (even optimized and proxied) clips on the same preview pane at once. We can let it sit and render but it still won't eventually display... That said we continued adding the remainder of the video clips and did an initial resizing and cropping by moving that video outside the track of all the other 100+ video clips on the timeline. That allowed us to see the video in the preview pane. Then moved it back, and screen blacked. I'm pretty convinced this might be the issue also because then I tried the compact clip option of say 20 clips, and immediately all the video clips appeared in the preview pane. We tried also deleting videos off the timeline down to 99 and the preview pane displayed fine even dubbing and scrolling through the timeline with video and audio seamlessly.
The issue seems to be that, either with our processor core usage, or the video card usage 8GB RAM along with our 16GB RAM that the processing at that point became too much. Has anyone else experience this? This project does seem to be a bit more large scale video editing than any normal person might do... I think our path forward is to sync the audio and then compact clip multiple videos to position. We want to show all 130 clips at once, then fade to individual clips of some 20-40 clips at a time, then end again with all 130.
Any additional tips are appreciated. We read about audio sync, we can try to do that as we had everyone start with an initial BEEP in the video to sync. Not sure how that works yet.