Participant

After Effects 25.4 suddenly dropping frames on ingested media (DJI drone, 4K, mp4)

Forum|Forum|3 days ago
June 2, 2026
2 replies
21 views

Been working on a project using the same version of AE for the past 6 months. Suddenly, drone footage that I’ve used since the beginning of this project is not previewing properly. I’ve tried emptying and clearing disk and conformed media caches, as well as reimporting the same clip. It skips frames, it plays some frames out of order, but then plays small chunks of the clip correctly.

Any ideas?

Nishu Kushwaha

Community Manager

Hi @ng-multi,

Thanks for reaching out.

In addition to what @RobShultz said, can you tell us more about the project? Which effects are you using? Are there any third-party plug-ins used? Could you share a screen recording of the issue to help us understand it better?

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks,

Nishu

N

ng-multiAuthor

Participant

No 3rd party plug-ins being used as this is how it’s interpreting the footage – it is dropping / misplacing frames just previewing the footage within AE. Plays fine outside of the program.

Nishu Kushwaha

Community Manager

Thanks for confirming. Since there are no third-party plugins and the footage plays fine outside AE, the issue could be within After Effects or how it decodes the media. DJI drone footage is often variable frame rate (VFR) H.264/HEVC, which AE can struggle with, especially in combination with GPU hardware decoding.

A couple of things to try:

Disable GPU hardware decoding. Go to Edit > Preferences > Imports (or Memory & Performance, depending on version) and turn off hardware-accelerated decoding. Restart AE and check if preview is correct.
As a confirming test, transcode one of the problem clips to ProRes 422 or DNxHR using Media Encoder or another tool, then import the transcoded media into AE. If it previews cleanly, that confirms the issue is with AE's decoding of the original MP4 due to VFR.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

Nishu

R