Solution for DJI footage problems with Premiere
TLDR: For problems with DJI footage in Premiere, just remux the video files using the “copy” feature of ffmpeg or the program Axiom. This quick and lossless process will give you a working file.
Full story:
The video from my DJI Flip has been having problems with Adobe Premiere lately. When I import these 4k60 video clips into the timeline, the playback is glitchy and just gets stuck and frozen on one frame, even as the audio continues playing and the playhead advances. This problem extends to exported video, as the resulting video remains frozen just the same.
There’s some discussion online of people having the same or similar problem with DJI footage, saying something about DJI’s encoding being problematic. The common solution provided is to convert your video to a more compatible format like ProRes. This is very unideal for me, as the conversion process is exceptionally slow on my 5800H/3070 laptop, especially when I would have to do this for all my footage going forward. And I don’t like the idea of the loss of quality from multiple conversions.
One idea I found is to remux the footage, which means to convert the video’s container format while retaining the original video data. This is a lossless process as there’s no decoding and encoding taking place, and it takes only seconds (essentially the amount of time needed to duplicate the file on your drive).
So I downloaded the Windows application Axiom, which is a GUI program for ffmpeg, the video converting engine that powers almost all video converters. I pointed the program to one of my problematic DJI clips, and under Video>Encoding>Video Codec I chose “Copy”. The copy command tells the program to remux the video rather than convert it. I kept all settings at their defaults and chose mp4 as the container format (so just going from mp4 to mp4). The result is a file around the same size as the original, which finally works fine in Premiere.
Please let me know below if this process helped you.