Hey Folks,

I wanted to reach out to fellow Mac users and see if you're running into this issue. I use a Mini 2 with 4K at 30FPS, manual mode and a SS of 60FPS. I notice a lag in my side panning shots and gimble down to the horizon line pan ups when playing back the footage on my Mac only. I re-watched the raw footage side by side on my Mac using Quicktime, VLC Player and a few others and the Mac consistently has judder and lag. If I play the same footage back on my 2019 Retina iPad or my fairly old 4K Samsung TV from a USB drive, the footage is smooth and looks great. Any ideas what would be causing this on the Mac? I have tried regular 2.7K on the Mac from the Mini 2 and that video is pretty smooth and without issues. It seems to be specifically with the Mini 2's 4k Footage. I have a brand new Macbook Pro 2020 Retina 13 Inch, 32 GB of RAM with 32 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X and 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7. It has a Intel Iris Plus Graphics 1536 MB. Is this a settings issue that can be resolved with a couple of clicks for a newbie video editor like me? Or is my machine just not up to the job?
Thanks,
Tim.

That sounds odd.

I have a 2019 MBP 13” 2.8ghz i7 16gb ram and watched a Mini2 video  with an external 4K monitor and it looked as smooth as anything.

Turning the drone round or tilting the gimbal were perfect.

I was using QuickTime player to view it.

I had originally copied to my iPhone with QuickTransfer then just now to my MBP but I checked that it was still 4K and it was.

Did you upload the footage from your mini sd card onto the harddrive of  your mac or are you playing the footage via cable from you drone?

dronie1965 Posted at 2-18 04:42
Did you upload the footage from your mini sd card onto the harddrive of  your mac or are you playing the footage via cable from you drone?

Thanks for your reply! I did upload to the laptop via the SD card. It’s saved on my desktop, which does store my data in the iCloud, but even when I save locally on the MacBook it does this. Very strange! Would love to know what the issue is, as I will be editing my footage on this Mac and it throws me off not knowing if the footage is bad or the playback

Is everything updated to the latest version?

ResonatorUAV Posted at 2-18 07:15
Is everything updated to the latest version?

Everything is updated to the latest version. Perhaps I should give Apple Care a call...

TJM1989 Posted at 2-18 07:26
Everything is updated to the latest version. Perhaps I should give Apple Care a call...

Yes you might have to. My late 2013 MacBook Pro plays these file types fine.
I hope you solve the problem my friend.

ResonatorUAV Posted at 2-18 07:40
Yes you might have to. My late 2013 MacBook Pro plays these file types fine.
I hope you solve the problem my friend.

Thank you!

Howdy, I was going to create a detailed thread explaining how to fix this and have a workaround.

But I'm too new, so I can't, might as well post the fix here.

First my specs,
macOS High Seria
128Gb of ram
Mid 2012 Intel Mac 12 core 2.66 GHz (Mac Pro Tower)
Nvidia GTX 780
External Raid 5 Storage

I do professional video editing for a living, and I mainly work with 4k 24p,30p.60p.

SO after doing some test editing on Adobe Premiere and watching my CPU spike to 90% every time I try to scrub through my footage on the timeline at 1/8th resolution.

I knew something wasn't adding up, so I took a closer look, turns out DJI invented a heavily modified version of the H.264 codec. It retains a massive amount of detail but the trade-off is that playback only works correctly if you have GPU-enabled graphics playback. Something that's native to PC users, but not MAC users because Apple writes their operating system to work more with CPU than GPU.

So after a lot of experimentation, I found that the old standby ProRes 422 codec fixes the problem.

ProRes 422 is an uncompressed format that can store HD,4K,6K,8K,  in a self-contained .mov file that will work natively on any mac made from 2012-Present.

The one big caveat is these files are HUGE, but the trade-off is a buttery smooth playback.

So this how you do it.

Adobe Media Encoder

-Drag Clip In the encoder window

-After importing the clip, select it to open the export settings.

-Format Option: Select Quicktime

-Preset Option: Select Apple ProRes 422

-Un-Check "Export Audio", you won't need this because DJI Drones don't record audio.

-Basic Video Settings - Select "Match Source"   this makes sure that your video exports at the correct Width & Height.

-Once everything is set hit OK and return to the main encoder window.

-You'll see a Renderer option with a drop-down menu with the following options

1.Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal)     <-----This means if your system has an Nvidia Card use this for faster encoding times.

2.Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (OpenCL) <-----This means if your system has an AMD mac approved card use this for faster encoding times.

3.Mercury Playback Engine Software Only <-------This means it will only use your CPU to output your video, this is the slowest option.

-Once you selected your Renderer,  press play and watch as your video is converted to ProRes 422  (NOTE: You render times WILL vary depending on hardware, GPU, CPU, and how much ram you have in your system)

Adobe Premiere

-From from timeline set In and Out points over the clip you want to export.

-File --> Export --> Media....

-Export Settings Window

-Format Option: Select Quicktime

-Preset Option: Select Apple ProRes 422

-Un-Check "Export Audio", you won't need this because DJI Drones don't record audio.

-Basic Video Settings - Select "Match Source"   this makes sure that your video exports at the correct Width & Height.

-Once everything is set you have 2 final options

1. select "Export" <-----This will start exporting your video

2. select "Queue" <-----This will open Adobe Media Encoder and you can finish the export process there.

So that's my workaround and that what helps me work with Dji Mini 2 wacky h.264 codec.

Yes this will create large files, but smooth playback is worth it.

djiuser_a9XflUPcZhC2 Posted at 2-18 23:00
Howdy, I was going to create a detailed thread explaining how to fix this and have a workaround.

But I'm too new, so I can't, might as well post the fix here.

Thanks so much! Do you know how I would do this conversion without Adobe? I am working with Final Cut Pro X. I tried exporting a file I was working on in the Codec you mentioned and still got the same lag, but I expect this probably wasn’t how to do what you just kindly took the time to explain.

As a follow-up question, and with you being a professional video editor, you might know what’s going on with another issue. My Mini 2 footage is jittery on the Mac but smooth and cinematic on my television and iPad. If I take the same raw footage, edit a short movie together in FCPX and export it as a finished product, when I play that exported movie back on my TV and iPad, now it has jittering too. It seems Mac does something to the footage. Raw footage is find on other devices, but take that raw footage, put it through FCP, suddenly it is jittery too.. So confused!

Thanks.

You need to export all with Optical Flow...you have for this DaVinci Resolve (free) or Adobe Premiere Pro (paid).
You can save in H265 also but remember to use BASIC profile and not the HIGH Profile, and change at profile from 4.1 to 6.2 version. (this is valid from both programs described).
Also you can try Filmora, but we never use it as we work in a professional area of video editing.
The tablet will play smooth as the display is smaller and computing power needed is far less than a monitor.
Also the TV have a jitter control that will make the image "optical flow" like.
The monitors will be the most hard to deal with, as you need to set the FPS according to your refresh rate of video card in order not to see "skipping" image. Also for Playback we use all time the POT PLAYER as we have tested over 20 players and all failed at 4K full res playback (because of hardware rendering that fails and goes to CPU rendering that sucks). I dont know if you find Pot Player for Mac, we all have Windows platforms, but you may search it.
Cheers.