I shot a bunch of 5k 24p, d-log, h264 clips yesterday and they are all coming out black on my mac studio in final cut pro. I've filmed tones of 5k footage with this drone and this is just happenind now. Whats going on?

Hi there, sorry about that. Could you please confirm whether these videos can be played normally on your mobile phone or other devices? Thank you.

D-Log in H264 is horribly incompatible with apps.  your best best is to convert it with handbrake.fr

H264 is the most comparable and least compressed. It’s worked for years. Why would it not work no and just show blacked out clips.
Wanda ill  test today. I was able to convert it in adobe media converter but compressor won’t process it.
This may have been caused after the last firmware update. I see other users reported this last year.

when i air drop it to my iphone it also shows as unplayable black clip

Felixtm Posted at 2-23 03:48
H264 is the most comparable and least compressed. It’s worked for years. Why would it not work no and just show blacked out clips.
Wanda ill  test today. I was able to convert it in adobe media converter but compressor won’t process it.
This may have been caused after the last firmware update. I see other users reported this last year.

A lot of people seem to fight back about h.264 and in some kind of denial about it being the cause of the issue.

Trust us when we say that h.265 will play your footage just fine and it'll look just as good.

CloudVisual Posted at 2-23 04:45
A lot of people seem to fight back about h.264 and in some kind of denial about it being the cause of the issue.

Trust us when we say that h.265 will play your footage just fine and it'll look just as good.

I'm sure you are correct but the rendering and transcoding time is much longer. 265 is further from prores than 264. we should be making drones which shoot closer to prores than further away from it.

Felixtm Posted at 2-23 05:16
I'm sure you are correct but the rendering and transcoding time is much longer. 265 is further from prores than 264. we should be making drones which shoot closer to prores than further away from it.

If you want ProRes, you should be flying a Cine version of your drone.

Not sure what you mean about rendering and transcoding the footage. FCPX handles h.265 like a dream, especially if you're using a Mac Studio. Again, the 'old' h.264 which can't reliably handle anything above 4K (and 10bit) will be the bottleneck here. I can't ever say I've sat in FCPX thinking 'boy this h.265 footage is a pain to use', but I have kicked myself having shot 10bit footage in h.264 and my client complaining that it won't play - a quick conversion using handbrake to h.265 and it plays perfectly.

I've never really thought of either codec being 'further away' from ProRes before, but if I looked at the two, h.265 is much closer to ProRes as it'll shoot 10Bit up to 8K. You're probably looking at the bitrate of the two and assuming that a higher bitrate must equal better footage, but h.265 is just more efficient at delivering the same quality content.

Might I suggest you search for h.264 vs h.265 and have a read up on the facts, as I feel that anything anyone says in this thread will just fall on deaf ears, as the solution to your problem lies solely with your choice of codec.

CloudVisual Posted at 2-23 06:13
If you want ProRes, you should be flying a Cine version of your drone.

Not sure what you mean about rendering and transcoding the footage. FCPX handles h.265 like a dream, especially if you're using a Mac Studio. Again, the 'old' h.264 which can't reliably handle anything above 4K (and 10bit) will be the bottleneck here. I can't ever say I've sat in FCPX thinking 'boy this h.265 footage is a pain to use', but I have kicked myself having shot 10bit footage in h.264 and my client complaining that it won't play - a quick conversion using handbrake to h.265 and it plays perfectly.

Neither of these codecs are great for editing. I'm a Premiere Pro user with no experience in Final Cut. I understand that FC may handle these compressed codecs better than Premiere does on the timeline but using any flavor of ProRes 422 will be better to edit with. Transcode the clips first. All DJI footage right off the drone is known to be difficult to edit because of high compression and variable frame rates.