Wouter Bouwens wrote:Thanks for the feedback. Why would it not edit smoothly? What is/are the component(s) that cause this?
John Paines wrote:...Some 4K h.265 material just won't play well in Resolve...
To elaborate a little on what John already wrote,
Basically, h.256 and h.264 are designed to be streamed and played back efficiently; i.e.,
continuously. Editing is different, because you're constantly seeking, jogging, scrubbing, and accessing random points in time. If you've ever tried to jump to an exact frame on YouTube, you'll notice that it's difficult for the same basic reason.
Camera manufacturers often choose to record h.26x, even though it isn't designed as an acquisition format, because they can reduce the data rate requirement of the storage media. Their cameras can record to cheap SD cards instead of expensive CFAST2, SSDs, or proprietary media. Whenever consumers don't need or don't care to edit the footage, like a lot of family vacation video (is that still a thing?), recording to h.26x means it's already in a format ready to view, and it's compressed enough to easily upload to social media, directly.
In some flavors of h.26x, the computer first has to find the nearest keyframe, which stores all of the pixel values, then work its way backward or forward, computing the changes from that keyframe to arrive at the correct image to display. Easy to stream, but feels choppy or laggy to edit, unless you've got hardware that's specifically optimized to do those calculations very quickly. Also the reason professional cameras like REDs, Arris and Blackmagic cameras don't record h.26x, and also the reason people transcode to ProRes, DNxHD, Cineform, etc.
Editing H.26x in Resolve isn't impossible, by any means. And new editors might not even notice a difference at first. But when you make thousands of edits a day, every day, those microseconds start to add up.