Only edited footage always exports with frame dropps / is choppy

[SimpleCast]

I'm on Premiere Elements 2023.

I'm editing some action cam footage of mine (all files are 4K and 59.94Fps) and when just making some clips and exporting them without and editing all is fine. But as soon as I actually edit the footage (e.g. change the "lighting" setting) it gets all choppy when exported.

I've tried all the "match projecct settings to footage settings" tips but nothing fixes this issue.

Does anyone know what is going on?

[SimpleCast]

Here are some more infos on my settings that are hopefully helpful with figuring this out:

Project settings: clip settings are automatically matched, I use the 60fps-Drop-Frame-Timecode (read that this would be ideal for 59.94Fps footage)

Export: I've got a preset where I've selected and saved the "match with source" option for the basic video settings

[Steve Grisetti]

Premiere Elements 2023 isn't able to edit 4K 60 fps natively. You'll need to shoot your 4K footage at 30p in order to edit it in Premiere Elements.

Try converting your existing footage to 4K at 30p using the great program Handbrake, then start a new project and see how the video loads. It should work perfectly.

[SimpleCast]

Hm, as far as my personal research goes it does support 4K 60Fps footage. I could only find that HEVC codec is not fully supported (my videos are all encoded with HEVC, forgot to mention that, sorry). 

All my footage does load in PE23 and I can render it for preview and everything. It also exports perfectly fine as 4K 59.94Fps file as long as I don't edit it. I can add texts, crop and cut, have multiple 4K 59.94Fps files side by side and it comes out perfectly fine.

Only when I click on the top right button to manipulate the footage (such as brightness etc.) it becomes choppy in the export. Maybe you mean this when saying it can't edit such files natively?

[Steve Grisetti]

Try loading a 3840x2160 30p video into a new project and see if you get better results. As I've said, the program is notoriously problematic with 4K 60p.