Air 3S, Mavic 4Pro & Apple Computers

[alfo2010]

This message requesting help from anyone living in the Nanaimo BC area. I purchased a Mavic 4 Pro when they were released here in Canada. Everything worked awesome until twelve days ago when I returned home the video played back but was choppy/glitchy and my initial thought was that my SD had issues but when I did a recording on the second SD card that DJI recommended a Lexar Silver Plus the same issue occurred. I then tried recording on the drone hard drive directly to my MacBook Pro Max (64GB ram), same issue. I thought that maybe the problem was the gimbal and checked it out, it was fine. After doing everything to I could to identify the issue, so I contacted DJI and spoke to a tech and we went through testing the drone checking all the setting etc. The tech passed me on to the supervisor and after a conversation he requested that I send the drone to DJI, and I did. I usually have a backup drone, but I sold it to friend that lost his Mini and wanted to buy my Mini 4 so I sold it to him. So, I purchased a Mavic 3S as a backup drone. The day after I purchased the drone I went out and did a shoot and came home and transferred the files to my Mac, same issue. I’ve had two conversations with Apple and their screen viewing and they are not sure what the problem is, but I’ll get back to them on Monday. The videos will not play back without being choppy/glitchy on my two 2024 MacBook M3’s, Mac Mini, two new Apple Air’s M4 chips no matter what player platform I use. I went to a friends place to do a test on his one-year-old Windows 11 PC and his computer would not recognize a direct feed from my drone or my hard drive formatted in exFAT that is supposed to be compatible with a PC. He formatted a small hard drive on his PC and again it came up with a code error. At this point DJI says they have done all the testing they can do and there is nothing wrong with the drone and they want to return it to me. If there is someone in the Nanaimo BC area I would really appreciate if you can loan me a two- or three-minute recoding on a SD card with a recording from a DJI drone to test if it will play back on an Apple computer. Thanks Al

 

[UAV Ernst]

Hello from Comox, Al. Have you put the video file directly on the SSD and tried playing it on several programmes that will play your video files on one of your Macs? Could it be a slower connection from an adapter for the little SD card, a not so fast USB cable, etc? I also found that some video applications have smoother playback than others.

 

[Dave Maine]

Check the settings for pixel dimensions and CODEC used and report back. The H265 codec can be particularly hard to play back. H264 may work better.

 

[HoozierDroneDaddy]

When I first played back a video from my M4 Pro, it was with a video player and it was also choppy. I then loaded it into Premier Pro and CapCut where it played smoothly on both. Not an expert, but it may be the players your using can't handle it. Try loading it into Premier, CapCut, or Devinci and see it they can run it smoothly. If so that will narrow down where your issue is.

 

[alfo2010]

six months ago I switch to CapCut Pro and it worked fine and then it didn't.It will not stabilize on DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro. It will not play properly in VLC, Elmedia Player paid version or Quick Time Player. There appears to be no way to change the coding format to H.264 on either the AC 2 or the Ac 2 Pro. The changes can only be made in the editing software to the best of my knowledge. Thank you very much for your reply. Cheers Al

Check the settings for pixel dimensions and CODEC used and report back. The H265 codec can be particularly hard to play back. H264 may work better.

I have been trying to switch to H.264 on both the AC 2 and AC 2 Pro, it can't be done. It appears that it can only be done in editing software like Final Cut Pro 10 or DiVinci Resolve. Thank you very much for your reply. Cheers

 

[Jim622]

I had the same problem last year with a new Windows machine. It turned out to be a problem with Premiere Pro.
I signed up for their beta tester program. The beta version worked flawlessly. A couple of months later, they had an official release that worked much better.

 

[florjankosir]

As HoozierDroneDaddy said.
Mavic 4 pro with the first camera allows video encoding only in H.265, which is more difficult, impossible or not smooth for video players. In the settings, you can enable the graphics card, which will make the playback smoother. If the graphics card is enabled, playback using the processor in the computer is better. Playing 6k images is also a demanding process.

To check, I would record a short 4K video with the second camera, where we can also set H.264 encoding. If that works, the reason is somewhere here.

 

[alfo2010]

Check the settings for pixel dimensions and CODEC used and report back. The H265 codec can be particularly hard to play back. H264 may work better.

I tried 1080p normal 24fps and still have the issue playing it back on Quick Time Player, Elmedia Player and VLC. Thanks for the information you have provided. Cheers Al