Blackmagic Forum

Hey folks, something I'm running into with importing footage from an Iphone 12. It's shot in HDR, it says on the phone that it is HEVC, yet Davinci thinks the file is h264. Am I doing something wrong? The file was sent to a Google Drive before being downloaded. I can't seem to find in the inspector what codec it is.

Sean van Berlo wrote:Hey folks, something I'm running into with importing footage from an Iphone 12. It's shot in HDR, it says on the phone that it is HEVC, yet Davinci thinks the file is h264. Am I doing something wrong? The file was sent to a Google Drive before being downloaded. I can't seem to find in the inspector what codec it is.

Download Mediainfo and you'll confirm what type of codec is your media file....

Sent from my Mi 9T using Tapatalk

That says the same thing, 4:2:0, 8 bit. So it's an iPhone sharing thing? Annoying.

HEVC aka H.265 can be 8 bit 4:2:0 too. My iPhone SE II is recording just that and it arrives correctly in DR as H265 main L4.0.
Oh, and actually, CFR!

I'd doubt the famed iPhone 12 would be worse.

Sean van Berlo wrote:Hey folks, something I'm running into with importing footage from an Iphone 12. It's shot in HDR, it says on the phone that it is HEVC, yet Davinci thinks the file is h264. Am I doing something wrong? The file was sent to a Google Drive before being downloaded. I can't seem to find in the inspector what codec it is.

You can't have h265 file been detected/decoded as h264 and work fine- this is simply IMPOSSIBLE.
Maybe some Resolve info is just showing wrong name, but I doubt it.
As suggested- use mediainfo to check what your file really is.

I literally stated two posts back that Mediainfo says it is 8 bit mp4 in an avc codec. The internal footage should be h.265 10 bit since that is what the iPhone 12 records hdr footage in. It also says it is hevc, not avc or mp4.

Are you sure you have original file from the phone, not some auto re-encode (gdrive re-encodes files, but should be only for preview) ?
iPhone also shots h264. No idea what you have set/done, but file is what mediainfo says.
x264/h264/avc etc describes the same thing in users world.
x265/h265/hevc - same as above for h265.
MP4 is just a container, so meaningless here. It holds your video and audio and those can use different codecs.
Point is - your file is h264, for whatever reason and Resolve has nothing to do with it

The iPhone often re-encodes when sharing, like when sending a video clip in an email. Don't know about Google Drive but I've been able to get the original files via OneDrive. It should be configurable.

Right, I am coming to that conclusion as well. It's just kind of weird. I know for a fact that original file is 10 bit HDR, I can see so right on the phone, yet when I export it, it is transcoded to mp4 h264 for some reason. It's a tick annoying because Google Drive is my storage provider of choice so I hope to get it working. Infuriating and very 'Apple' in my opinion.

EDIT; it DOES work via Icloud. Well, that's annoying.

And it's not Google Photos you're downloading from? There everything is transcoded after upload.

roger.magnusson wrote:And it's not Google Photos you're downloading from? There everything is transcoded after upload.

No, I tried both, but good suggestion!

Curiously, I have put an HDR10 hevc sample file on my Google photos and even though it plays as AVC1 in Photos, it's still hdr10 HEVC when downloaded. When you sync to Photos there is a requester that asks you if you want to keep the original or transcode or something along these lines.

Google drive should store original file for sure. It creates preview just for playback, but when you download it's always original file.