Choppy playback in editing

[MattBeOnKey]

My xh2s footage is playing back rather choppy. I'm sooting 4k 16:9 Mov/H.265 All-I 4:2:2 10 bit 360mbps. I'm editing in FCP on a 2 year old MBP with 8 core i9 32gb of ram and 8 gb gpu. I know the computer can handle this and more. I've tried editing off the internal ssd and external mechanic disk and finally an external ssd. all of them are the same editing experience. Just feel like I'm missing some simple setting in FCP. Thanks 

[Don Barar]

You might want to consider the following:

1) Use optimized media.  These are ProRes files that can be generated inside FCP, or 

2) Use proxies.

Incidentally, I too had difficulty editing 4K H.265 All I 4:2:2 10 bit recorded at 360 mbps with FCP.  Playback was choppy, as you have pointed out, so proxies or optimized media were required.  To improve performance I purchased a MBP16 M1 Max, 32 core GPU, and 64 GB of RAM.  I no longer have to take time to generate optimized media.  Also, I switched to Davinci Resolve Studio.  I think it is a better editing experience than FCP.

Hope this helps.

Don

[MattBeOnKey]

Thanks! I'll give that a try. it's weird because 4k 120fps and 1080 240fps playback with no issue. I've thought about switching to davinci. I have uses it and thought a lot was similar to FCP.

[-Nathan-]

Hs65 files are "delivery" files and are hard to handle for any editor. Its like opening a .rar or .zip file and then doing a bunch of photoshop edits on it, its just not optimised at all for editing.

Chucking horsepower at the problem may help, but the nature of the filetype will probably cause problems quite often, even high specc'd machines can have trouble with them. Doing optimised media helps because it creates a file thats not compressed and good for editing, the downside is the waiting and constant clearing of temp cache on your hard drive.

If you're doing a lot of shooting I'd grab a CF card and shoot in ProRes, it wont have the problems H264/265 files have, its a proper editing codec and will be handled much better when editing. CF is an annoying format to shell out on but if we're this deep with the XH2 then you might as well maximise it with ProRes over CF.... or ProRes RAW / Blackmagic RAW via an external recorder. 

[ChrisKou]

What kind of hard drive are your files on? I was having slow playback from my video. I moved clips over to an SSD and things sped up immensely. 

Ah, just saw you said you tried SSD. Yeah, switch to Prores in that case. It edits smoothly for me from an SSD. 

Edited April 8, 2023 by ChrisKou