AME H.265 to ProRes 422 - Choppy Mess

[Sir__Nicolas_Remington]

Hi all,

I apologize if this question has been answered already, but I couldn't seem to find it.

I recorded alot of footage on my GoPro Hero 7 Black in 4k60fps while on vacation and I'm looking to edit it. However, since the GoPro Hero 7 Black shoots in H.265 HEVC it would be resource heavy to try to edit it directly in Premiere Pro.

I've decided to convert the footage over to a editing friendly format such as ProRes 422. However, after a successful conversion playback is extremely choppy, image quality seemed to be retained, but the framerate is somewhere on the line of 15fps or less if i were to guess. I've read somewhere that the footage may be variable and confusing the encoder, however using a MediaInfo application my footage is indeed constant.

Perhaps my PC specs could assist in finding a solution or determining a bottleneck:

CPU: i7-9700k @4.7GHz

GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070

RAM: 32gb @3000Mhz

The footage is located on a Western Digital Black 2TB HDD 7200RPM. Perhaps the slow hard drive is causing problems?

I'll try encoding to and from a M.2 SSD to see if it alleviates the choppy footage.

I'm open to suggestions.

Many Thanks,

Henry T.

[Sir__Nicolas_Remington · Accepted solution]

After some fiddling around, moving the footage to a SSD and encoding it again. It still appeared choppy. I was using VLC media player to view the footage at this point and just decided to throw it into Premiere Pro and give it a go. And it just works perfectly and utilizing less CPU resources as well.

And then it hit me. It makes absolute sense. H.265 runs poorly in Premiere Pro because it's highly compressed and ProRes runs poorly in VLC because it's uncompressed and a editing format.

It was fool hardy of me to think VLC could preview both formats with ease.