Export Questions

Most of this is just learning how the app works. As project names rarely have anything to do with chosen export names, the export dialog takes an 'assumed' name from the first clip. As it always has. One of the first things to learn is how to export, and that always starts with how to name and set the location of the export. For best operation of the hardware, for years it has been advised to have exports be made to a different drive than the project files or media. But really, you need to set that yourself.

You mention using a mix of drone, cellphone and stills. Drones and phones create media in what is called long-GOP form. Rather than saving the media to storage as individual frames, there's a specialized chip that breaks the images into parts and decides when to store a highly-compressed but complete frame called an i-frame, and when to simply store matrixed data sets of the pixels that have changed since the previous i-frame or will change before the next i-frame ... or both. These are called p and b 'frames'.

For playback and for export, the computer has to call up an i-frame and decompress it, store to RAM ... call up the next frame's data-set, recall the stored previous frame, compute the new frame from the old frame's pixels plus the replacement pixels, store to RAM ... rinse & repeat. Incredibly CPU intensive process.

So, even powerful machines can take quite some time to export from (and to!) long-GOP H.264 media.

Now ... phone media adds another challenge. Nearly all phone media doesn't even have a set frame-rate, it's variable frame rate media ... VFR. To cut down data recorded to disc, if the phone sees not much motion it will record fewer frames per second than it is set for. And for a few frames, may record even more fps than the setting you chose. Until recently, PrPro wouldn't even work with any VFR media on a timeline, we had to transcode and convert such media via Handbrake before importing.

When you bring VFR media into PrPro now, I do recommend selecting all the VFR media in a bin, right-click and modify/interpret footage as ... and setting the assumed framerate to the setting you had in the phone. Do that before putting a clip on a sequence, as changes in the bins only apply to media before it's used on a sequence. Once on a sequence, you need to select the clip individually and change the assumed FPS.

If you show your screen-grabs as PeruBob requested, we can offer other suggestions.

Neil

Can you post screenshots of your sequence settings, output settings and media properties?