Drone footage is blurry

OK, I' have the latest version of FCPX and when I play footage back in the timeline it's blurry. When I pause the footage it gets sharp. Play again, blurry. Pause again, it gets sharp. When exporting out the footage it's all blurry. Photos are fine. Issue seems to be with video and my buddy is also having the same issue so I know it's not just me. Any ideas what could be causing this? Bug?

Here's a Dropbox link to a video I made showing the issue

www.dropbox.com/s/r4ytbvvwjwmjvlr/blurry%20video2.mov?dl=0

I would really love to find a solution to this or it's back to Premier I go. This has basically stopped my editing on all my projects. UGH

Please give complete specs of the media and your project properties. Has anything been done to the clip in the project, any effect applied, and process ongoing?

How exactly are you exporting? What specs?

It looks to me like you have your quality setting as 'Better Performance'. This allows for smoother playback but reduces quality of the image while playing. Click 'View' in the top right corner of the viewer and select 'Better Quality' instead of 'Better Performance' and see if that fixes your problem.

It looks like it's behaving exactly the way 4K footage on my machine does when I have a bunch of effects on it.

Good luck!

The drone footage is most likely 4K H.264 footage (at least my drone footage is). When I'm editing that type of footage in FCPX on my laptop it does the same thing. This lets me edit "best performance" and view the footage realtime with smooth playback. Once it's rendered (or exported) the footage looks great. I would be shocked if PP on a laptop has better performance but if it does then go for it. On my iMac Pro the footage looks crisper during unrendered playback but it's also a beast of a machine.

PPro does not have better performance on any Mac than FCPX. One advantage is that if your footage pushes your hardware too hard for playback, it will degrade the image quality a bit during playback to make this happen. Going back to PPro won't help, I can assure you of this. There's tons of side-by-side demonstrations of this.

Laptops don't have the best GPUs in them, so you won't get as good performance on them as you will on a desktop. Just a fact of life. Huge, powerful GPUs are simply not that small.

Change your settings, as Doug said.