Hey Pilots.

I'm trying to figure out how to work with HEVC clips and so far I'm stumped.

My system seams to drag and lag and stutter during playback and editing.

It always handled H264 clips just fine but can't seem to make H265 work well at all.

I know the programs I'm using for editing and playback can handle H265.


So I look into my system and here's the specs...

HP Envy
Intel Core i7-6700 CPU 23.4GHs
16GB Installed RAM'
GeForce GTX970 Graphics Card.

Is there something I need to upgrade....or download. What am I missing?

Thanks for your help.

Hello and good day Rockyraaccoon. Thank you for reaching out and for the inquiry. I hope that you will get the best recommendation from out valued DJI co pilots with regards to this matter. Thank you.

can you be more specific with what you are trying to achieve?  what does "work with" mean?  editing videos in premier?  playing them back?     second of all which apps are you using and what settings?

The H.265 codec really compresses the data a lot that it stores in its file.  Because of this, it takes a lot more of a system to be able to handle it smoothly.  

I had a system that was higher spec than the one you listed and I couldn't get H265 files to play back smoothly in Premiere Pro for more than a few seconds at a time.  

I've now passed my old computer to my photographer wife and upgraded myself to a crazy powerful computer and it handles them like a champ.  Not sure where my bottleneck was in my previous system, but the sweet spot appears to be somewhere in the middle.

Old Computer:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700x
- GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060
- Memory: 32GB RAM
- Storage: 2 separate SSDs. One for OS/Apps/Scratch files and one for source media files

New computer:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x
- GPU: Nvidia GTX 2070
- Memory: 64GB RAM
- Storage: 3 separate SSDs. One for OS, one for Apps/scratch fiels, and one for source media files

KlooGee Posted at 10-26 10:09
The H.265 codec really compresses the data a lot that it stores in its file.  Because of this, it takes a lot more of a system to be able to handle it smoothly.  

I had a system that was higher spec than the one you listed and I couldn't get H265 files to play back smoothly in Premiere Pro for more than a few seconds at a time.  

On my older computer I specified above, I would end up using proxy files with Premiere Pro.  It was a bit of a pain up front, but made the editing process so much better.

So it can be done with a computer that doesn't have the necessary resources, it just takes a bit of extra upfront work to make it happen.

my system handles H.265 video editing just fine and its fairly modest.  

my system specs:
formfactor: Laptop/Ultrabook (Dell XPS 15)
CPU: i7-8705G (4 cores, 8 threads)
system memory: 16GB DDR4 (2400 mhz dual channel)
GPU: Radeon Vega M w/ 4GB HBM2
Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD
Display: 4K 60hz Sharp IGZO with 93% DCI-P3

The latest intel chips will handle H265/HEVC just fine but the slightly older ones will struggle,  the best way is to work with proxy files that your editor can pre render before you start your edit,  but it will add some time to the process.

DAFlys Posted at 10-28 00:17
The latest intel chips will handle H265/HEVC just fine but the slightly older ones will struggle,  the best way is to work with proxy files that your editor can pre render before you start your edit,  but it will add some time to the process.

for  AMD,  Radeon  "polaris" series GPUs can natively work with HEVC / H.265 in ASIC. and hybrid render (GPU compute + ASIC rendering) on R9 series.  but i'm not sure if adobe premier even uses the render engines on Radeon graphics since i think Adobe just uses generic Opengl  which anyone with Radeon graphics knowns isnt well supported in drivers.

for Nvidia, that their HVEC / H265 native rendering (ASIC based) didn't start until "pascal" or 10 series.  "Maxwell" or 900 series could hybrid render (gpu compute + asic) HEVC / H.265.  i believe Adobe Premiere can use the NVENC engine (nvidia's encoder engine) or Cuda Compute so likely slowing down because 900 series hybrid renders so chewing up cycles.


for intel, anything after skylake could work both directions (encode and decode) with HEVC / H.265 natively in asic.  however skylake could only decode, and to encode HEVC video on skylake iGPUs you pretty much had to force it into software (CPU) which is ungodly slow.

HereForTheBeer is right.

My system is EXACTLY like yours - just a Dell Alienware.
Unfortunately, neither the i7-6700 nor the GTX970 has h.265 native hardware acceleration.

Options are to shoot in h.264, transcode the h.265 to h.264 or use proxy files as KlooGee and DAFlys mention.
(DNxHR SQ - half resolution is a good proxy file)
Davinci Resolve Studio DOES handle h.265 ok though. (not the free version)

And exporting as h.264 should be recommended as many (most) people also have systems that can't handle h.265 well.