GoPro footage playback issues

Hello.
New here and new to Davinci Resolve 16 free.
Tried to work on some footage from my GoPro Hero 5 black (2.7K/50FPS) and found that after importing it the playback in both the Cut and Edit pages is choppy. Tried some iPhone footage with the same settings and that played back nicely. Then tried iPhone 4K/60FPS and that played back nicely too.
For some reason the program is incapable of a smooth playback of footage above 25FPS (regardless of resolution). When I play it back on the Edit page the frame counter top left shows the correct FPS but the image is choppy.
I have tried Media Optimization together with some other tricks I found on Youtube - no joy.

Any help will be greatly appreciated - my feeling is there is something wrong with the GoPro footage. Could it be the SD card - Sandisk Ultra 128GB, XC-1?

GPU - Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

Many thanks in advance.

Your hardware might limit that anyway, but if you are not using a Mac, you'll also need Resolve Studio.

If the playback frame rate is green and you're getting dropped frames, go to the Timeline Monitor menu and check the option for Show All Video Frames.

If the playback sways from green after that, report back.

If the playback frame rate is green and you're getting dropped frames, go to the Timeline Monitor menu and check the option for Show All Video Frames.

If the playback sways from green after that, report back.

I am having similar problems. Video plays fine when playing through "source tape" in the "cut" tab. If I switch that to "source clip" it skips frames. If I play in the edit tab and unclick show all frames it drops frames but plays audio fine. If i click show all frames it only reaches 49 fps max no matter how low quality i transcode or generate media at and plays in slower motion with red dot. Plays fine when I put the same clip in a 29.97 timeline.

I had task manager open to see if bottle neck from CPU or GPU and CPU is at 60% and GPU stays at 20%. I have the files stored on an internal SSD.

H.264 and other highly-compressed codecs are intended as DELIVERY formats, not necessarily to be used for editing and final color. Using H.264 puts a lot of stress on the computer, since it has to de-compress the images and play them back at speed, in addition to applying all the processes Resolve requires. My advice is to transcode all the H.264 GoPro material to a simpler codec for your system, something visually-lossless like DNxHR or ProRes 422HQ, and use that instead. You'll get much better performance that way.

The alternative is to use Optimized Media, which basically transcodes it all in the background. My preference is to do it manually, because then I can control where the files go and how they're named. Resolve 17 has a method to do this automatically.

H.264 and other highly-compressed codecs are intended as DELIVERY formats, not necessarily to be used for editing and final color. Using H.264 puts a lot of stress on the computer, since it has to de-compress the images and play them back at speed, in addition to applying all the processes Resolve requires. My advice is to transcode all the H.264 GoPro material to a simpler codec for your system, something visually-lossless like DNxHR or ProRes 422HQ, and use that instead. You'll get much better performance that way.

The alternative is to use Optimized Media, which basically transcodes it all in the background. My preference is to do it manually, because then I can control where the files go and how they're named. Resolve 17 has a method to do this automatically.

If I am transcoding from within Resolve my only options for MP4 are H.264, is there somewhere else I can transcode to the other formats?

While you can use other software, like Shutter Encoder, you should check that again. Even the free version can transcode to other formats. You need to change the container, though, to MOV or MXF.

I only have a GoProHero7Black and a GoProMax to play with.
I do also have Resolve Studio
But my process is to use optimized media either DNxHR LB or ProRes 422 LT
I might also suggest you watch this guy's video on running large-format clips on low-spec machines -

I am having similar problems.

Try using Optimized Media. (I favor Cineform 10 bit at 1/4 resolution.)

Hi there,
I am reading this thread very interested as I recently started with DavinciResolve Studio without testing it before. I got the special offer "Software plus Speed Editor". Now I really wonder how it comes that my DJI video files from OSMO Pocket 2 show the same problems with DavinciResolve described so far. My files are H.264 UltraHD with 59.94f/s. It is very true that these files make no problems at all in other Editing Programs. I can work with them natively (no Proxies, no Optimised Media) in FinalCut Pro and MediaComposer in OSX (not to mention playback in QuickTime-Player is just perfect too). And with Vegas Pro in Windows10 they also play natively without a problem. I have an iMac 2019, i9 Intel, 64GB RAM running OSX Big Sur and Windows10 via BootCamp.
So somehow I do have the idea that DavinciResolve could do a better job if Software Developers look over and and optimise the playback engine. I would not have bought it and payed money for it if I knew that there is this problem. I have an expensive computer not to render Proxy Files or Optimised Files that take my NVME SSD Space. I want to copy the raw material of my cameras and expect my modern computer to playback those without time consuming modifications of the files. So instead of giving the people good advice how to create a workaround for smoother playback - please Blackmagic: make the software work.