Playback of short Mavic 3 clips pause and are laggy

[Magnar_ce]

Hello,

I have a 2021 Macbook Pro with the M1 Max and 64gb of ram, and playback of Mavic 3 footage in Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 is laggy, pauses, and overall terrible.  I don't understand this, the system is plenty fast enough to handle this footage and Quicktime has no issues playing the footage - I can grab the cursor and move forward/backward at any speed I like and it's smooth, but in Adobe I can't even play a 20 second clip beginning to end without it pausing, and if I grab the cursor to move ahead of behind the picture doesn't change it stays.

Clip properties (shot on mavic 3 with flat color profile):

Type: MPEG Movie 
File Size: 349.50 MB
Image Size: 3840 x 2160
Frame Rate: 59.94
Total Duration: 00:00:23:50
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0
Alpha: None
Color Space: Rec. 709
Color Space Override: Off
Input LUT: None
Video Codec Type: HEVC 10 bit  4:2:0 

I've tried changing the playback resolution to 1/2 and full both with same result although there is no reason this should not work at full.

My system has OS Monterray 12.5 and Adobe Premiere Pro 22.5.0.

I also have some 5.7k footage from a GH6 which plays back smoothly, seems that only the DJI footage doesn't playback well in Premiere Pro.

[R Neil Haugen]

The particular options chosen in drone long-GOP/H.264/5 media can be a bear for editing systems, even with the correct hardware bits for decoding that stuff. I'm not familiar with the specific hardware bits your Mac has so can't comment, but a couple other users who 'hang' around these parts do have the specifics.

That media is just ... nasty ... stuff. Most of my colorist buds ... with massive Macs or PCs, in the 20-25G range for the computer by the time they've got it fully specced, NOT including monitors and RAIR arrays ... hate getting a project with drone footage. Many simply make proies or t-code it immediately on reciept.

Neil

[Jake25937280s99z]

saame problem any update would be great. im having that problem not sure what to do

[R Neil Haugen]

For playback issues with H.264 media, especially from drones, making Cineform or ProRes proxies is typically a wise solution.

Neil

[Mueller Media Group]

yo!  I have the exact same problem and I'm on a brand new m1 mac / ( though its a year old) whatever. 

I'm at 1/8 resolution. SAME framerate . . EVEEN after rendering in to out sequence in premiere. . playback is laggy. 

THIS ONLY happens when editing DJI drone footage. . mp4 . . 

I dug through some forums for Premiere AND DJI. . and it's hard to say the solution becuase even on higher end machines, folks are having the same issue.   Boiling down to premire and it's handling of mp4 AND .mov footage files. 

Like Mr. Niel said here below,  making proxies is a good work around which is still super lame considering the drone files are tuny in file size comapred to a sony fx / z cam/ or even red cam 

Cheers mates!! 

[R Neil Haugen]

The file size on disc has nothing to do with playback, really. Or very, very little.

It's the file type ... especially the compression and encoding methods ... that count.

RED media is actually pretty "light" to run, until you hit say 8k, where there's just so flippin' many pixels per frame that the computational load adds up.  Cineform is another codec noted for ease of playback, as are most DNx and ProRes variants. And all of them take some to a lot more disc space.

Drones push the boundaries of both compression and encoding .... like, did you know, there isn't actually a real frame for the vast majority of any of those clips? There's only a complete real frame, if highly compressed, every maybe 15-30 frames of the clip. In long-GOP land, those are called iframes.

Between iframes, you have p or b "frames" ... they are only a dataset of pixels that will change before the next iframe, or that have changed since the last iframe, or ... both.

So the computer has to de-encdode and de-compress up to 60 frames,  and store those images somewhere,  simply to show the next frame on the monitor.

If all an app does is play video files back, the computer can keep up normally. BUT ... in an NLE, like Premiere, Resolve, or Avid, running the app itself is a load, besides playing back a jumbled sequence of bits of clips on a sequence with whatever other effects have been applied.

So unless your computer has the (mostly Intel) bits for CPU/mobo work on long-GOP decoding/decompression, H.264/5 playback is a right bunch of goo.

I work for/with/teach pro colorists. Most of whom 1) run "heavy iron" computers that make our rigs look pathetically weak and cheap and 2) work in Resolve or Baselight. So yea, I'm in Resolve a lot. And in a ton of workflow discussions with the people working from music vids to major movies, docs, and a ton of episodic.

Most colorists immediately transcode any significant mp4/long-GOP media on receiving the client media. And grade using the t-codes. Because they simply don't wanna mess with long-GOP.

And note, this does inlude even some AVCHD clips. 

And there are shops out there, that like has been the process in Avid, that on receiving client media ... t-code all of it to the same codec. For ease of playback and complete similarity between files.

There are still many long-form projects where one of the DIT's requirements ... or at times the assistant editor, depending on how the project is organized ... this person takes all camera media, and transcodes to the specified media for the project so that all media is one format. Then them make proxies from those t-codes, so that any editor can choose at any time whether to run the full media or t-codes.

H.264/5 will be used to send things through frame.io or other services to people who need to see current status of a scene or sequence. But that's about it.