HEVC video glitching unless set to "smooth video motion"

Question

Footage filmed on my android OnePlus 9 Pro using the hevc codec plays totally fine on my windows 11 pro with i7 i8700K and GTX1080 in VLC media player but glitches terribly in playback in premiere unless I bring it into the timeline and change the Mpeg Souce Settings Variable Frame Rate setting to "smooth video motion" instead of the default "audio sync" in the clip's source settings in the effect controls panel. The fact that this problem persists in the source monitor suggests to me that it is not timeline settings related.

Also when I set my phone to record in non-HEVC codec the results are fine in premiere. Both files are variable frame rate so my guess is that while variable frame rate is part of the issue it is not the only issue. Also interestingly even though it's clearly visibly choppy (even jumping back a frame every once and a while) Premiere is not reporting any dropped frames.

I have tried to no avail:

Preferences>Media> HEVC hardware accellerated decoding: on/off for nvidia, intel, both, neither
Project settings>Playback and renderer: software only, Nvidia CUDA, Nvidia OpenCL
Changing file source location: local drive, server, etc
updating nvidia drivers

The computer seems to have no problem playing the video, and since in premiere the only solution I have is painstakingly changing the settings away from "audio sync" my guess is this has something to do with how premiere handles audio so I've also played around with those settings including latency numbers in preferences, different outputs, deleting audio track etc.

I know HEVC is "not an editing format" but it's silly that these clips can be edited on my phone easier than this powerful PC.

R Neil Haugen · Answer

First, long-GOP formats are a bunch of pain to edit, that's a LOAD more work on the system than simply playing a file in a player.

Second, you're adding in variable framerate, which is another pain point. The number of frames constantly changes but the audio is stationary. And NLEs are designed to work with specific framerates.

You'd get better results with converting that to CFR in Handbrake or ShutterEncoder prior to using in Premiere. And perhaps also by creating proxies.

Cute little video apps don't have near the complexity nor capabilities of an NLE like Premiere. They run far less through the system because they don't do much, and most of what they can do is simple scripted changes.

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