It's a massive pain when I'm trying to work with 1080p videos, especially at the sizes I'm working with. Is there any possible way to speed the process up somehow?
Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.
Is the bottleneck your CPU or HD? Check in resource monitor.
If it's your HD, reencode your file to make it smaller.
If it's your CPU, try upgrading to PPRO CS6+ which includes mercury engine & enable it https://www.google.com/search?q=premiere%2Bmercury%2Bengine&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
or
https://www.google.com/search?q=premiere%2Bmercury%2Bengine+on+windows&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
...my graphics card doesn't support the Mercury engine.
Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.
If it's an AMD/Ati/Inhell, it defnitely won't. If you read closer, you might be able to hack some files for PPRO to support your NVidia gfx crad.