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Can someone help explain this video setting issue?

ClearPropMedia

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Joined
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Hey everyone,

Happy to be part of the community. I recently bought the new Mavic 3. I’ve been flying the Mini 2 for some time now, and I felt like I wanted to splurge and upgrade. I’ve noticed something odd with my footage on the new M3 though.

5K in H264 drives my MacBook crazy. H265 seems fine at that resolution though. But that resolution in H264 causes the video to freeze up, stutter, lag, and all kinds of slowness. H264 doesn’t seem to cause issues in 4K or in DLog. Any ideas?

Also, what settings would you recommend for best footage? The M3 has the following choices:

The choice between MP4 or MOV (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265)
The choice between H.264/H.265 Bitrate: 200 Mbps

Resolutions available:
5.1K: 5120×2700@24/25/30/48/50fps
DCI 4K: 4096×2160@24/25/30/48/50/60/120*fps
4K: 3840×2160@24/25/30/48/50/60/120*fps
FHD: 1920×1080p@24/25/30/48/50/60/120*/200*fps

Color: Normal or D-Log
Video Bitrate: CBR or VBR

My MacBook has the following specs:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
32 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 1536 MB

Thank you so much for your time and help.
 
Are you sure you haven’t reversed the results of your experiment? H265 always presents more difficulty in playback than H264. It is a far more complex code requiring much more powerful graphics performance from the PC whether Apple or PC.

I use a variety of Apples, and they all play back H264 better. Depending on the video editor I use, I sometimes need to convert the footage to ProRes to get smooth playback.
 
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Nope, I actually created several videos. I wrote down the settings that I was using for every video and at the beginning of each video held that up to the camera so I knew exactly which setting was being used on each video. The H264 in 5K was consistently terrible. It was basically unviewable. The H265 was perfect.. so it is very confusing. This is specifically with 5K though. If I change to 4K, H264 seems to work without problem!
 
Hey everyone,

Happy to be part of the community. I recently bought the new Mavic 3. I’ve been flying the Mini 2 for some time now, and I felt like I wanted to splurge and upgrade. I’ve noticed something odd with my footage on the new M3 though.

5K in H264 drives my MacBook crazy. H265 seems fine at that resolution though. But that resolution in H264 causes the video to freeze up, stutter, lag, and all kinds of slowness. H264 doesn’t seem to cause issues in 4K or in DLog. Any ideas?

Also, what settings would you recommend for best footage? The M3 has the following choices:

The choice between MP4 or MOV (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265)
The choice between H.264/H.265 Bitrate: 200 Mbps

Resolutions available:
5.1K: 5120×2700@24/25/30/48/50fps
DCI 4K: 4096×2160@24/25/30/48/50/60/120*fps
4K: 3840×2160@24/25/30/48/50/60/120*fps
FHD: 1920×1080p@24/25/30/48/50/60/120*/200*fps

Color: Normal or D-Log
Video Bitrate: CBR or VBR

My MacBook has the following specs:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
32 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 1536 MB

Thank you so much for your time and help.
What are you playing back in?
 
Your not alone. I get the same issue when recording in 5.1k H.264. H.265 works fine. I even blew almost $200 on a Kingston React UHS-II V90 U3 Class 10 rated card with a high read write speed for 8k video and the same issue.
 
Underpowered computers are almost always the cause of poor playback. SD speed of U3 should provide clean video feeds. Other than buying a more powerful computer you have a couple of options.

1. Transcode the footage into ProRes for editing. Even fairly anemic computers can play this without trouble, Transcode back at the end to H264 or H265 for streaming distribution.

2. In your NLE, set up and use proxy videos to edit with than attempting to use the DJI native footage. As in 1 above, switch back to full res for the final output.

DJI's codecs in particular are problematic for editing. Displaying them directly on a USB drive into a TV with hardware decoding generally works fine, but leaves you with long boring shots if you haven't edited them.

This approach is very common in professional editing where you are getting 4, 6 and 8K originals from Red or other high end video cameras. Blackmagic Design provides ProRes files directly from some of their cameras that sidestep the transcode to ProRes.

Note that ProRes files are easily 600% larger than the source DJI footage.
 
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