Unable to play uncompressed iPhone 13 Pro Max videos

[Eric Noren]

I cannot play videos, recorded on my new iPhone 13 Pro Max, in Lightroom on my mobile devices. It works fine in Lightroom on my Mac. These are large files, so it does work if I compress them, but this is a nuiscance and leads to loss of quality.

Any chance that this will be fixed by Adobe? Any other suggestions?

[Charlie.D]

Hello @Eric Noren 

I am not able to reproduce any trouble.  I have tried with a recently captured iPhone 13 Pro Max ProRes video (as well as compressed Cinematic, HDR, and regular 8-bit video).  Maybe my video file sizes simply aren't as big as yours.  Can you confirm the size (in MB or GB) of the video that is a problem for you?

There could be an file sizee upper limit for transcoding files for streaming playback to other devices your account uses.  I'll inquire with our backend team about this. 

The reason LR Mac still works is original videos are downloaded for local playback, I believe.

[Eric Noren]

Thanks so much for replying, the first video I took lasted 40 seconds, and would not play until I compressed it down to 720 resolution in QuickTime. It was 528 MB, which is quite large I suppose. I confess I don't know what the camera settings for that video were, as it was the first one I took and I was just trying it out.

Since yhen, as a result of your comments, I have been playing around with it, and I now find that I CAN play the videos on my portable devices, if I use ProRes, and I am finding that a 30 second video is about 100 MB, so goodness knows why the first video I took was so large!

Anyway, I thank you, as I think I can now make it work.

[Charlie.D]

Hi @Eric Noren 

To be clear, I am not advising you to capture in ProRes -- be careful as those can become huge after only seconds of recording.  I have a 2 sec ProRes video from my iPhone 13 that is 235 MB (for 4K 30fps video).  I will probably stay with regular or HDR video capture for most of my own personal use, just to keep file sizes down.

I'm still mystified why some of your videos won't playback for you.  Would it be possible for you to share a sample problem video with me?  If so, I'll send you instructions on how to share it with me.

[Eric Noren]

I take your point about using HDR and am intending to do so myself. 

I really don't know what's happening, because I have played around with video recording, various modes and file sizes, and now it all seems to work in LR on my portable devices! I cannot understand why this wasn't working yesterday! I even managed to import a cinematic video and played it in LR on my iPad.

Hopefully this will continue to work now.

I thank you for your interest and help. I ill post here if I get further problems. Thanks.