Issue with iPhone Footage

Hi there,
I’ve been looking everywhere but I can’t find anyone that has the same problem as me... I hope someone can help me out on here!
I keep having these distortions in my footage and I don’t know how to fix it. It’s like a glitch, those artifacts popping up for one or two seconds. They only appear when I’m working with footage filmed on iPhones, but they appear randomly. There’s no pattern or anything obvious, it has nothing to do with the framerate, the device I’m working on, etc.
Some of them are randomly there when I first watch the footage and gone when I watch it the second time, some of them always stay on the same spot, no matter if I exchange or shorten the clip... when I keep re-playing only the affected part, it usually goes away, but as soon as I play the whole vid again, it’s back. Sometimes clips just work, but other times, they don’t.

I currently have version 10.4.8 and already checked for updates, I’ve tried rendering it multiple times and I’ve also already tried deleting all the rendering files. It doesn’t get any better.

Can anyone help me with that issue? At this point I’m pretty close to just throwing my Macbook out the window.. I’ve already spent hours on this project and I have a deadline on it, so I’d appreciate any kinds of helpful ideas.
Thank you in advance,
Annika

Are you shooting in 4K? What version of MacBook are you using? Is the media on an external SSD, rotating drive, or the computer internal drive? Are you using proxy's? It looks a little like the drive cannot serve the data fast enough so the frames are being dropped or stuttering.

You either have an underpowered Mac, which I doubt. Or some odd codec FCPX doesn't like. What is the source of your files?

Play the original iPhone video in Quicktime Player, then do CMD+I and tell everything in that "Inspector" window. That will help understand the codec characteristics.

Then we need to know the year, model and exact config of your Mac. Just do Apple menu>About This Mac. Type everything on that window except the serial number and post it here.

I had a similar problem recently, in the end, I converted the iPhone footage to ProRes with ff-Works then imported to FCPX and that sorted it.

DaveF wrote: I had a similar problem recently, in the end, I converted the iPhone footage to ProRes with ff-Works then imported to FCPX and that sorted it.

The OP apparently rendered the timeline -- it's blurry but I can't see any render dots. If rendered, all playback and subsequent export encoding is generally from the ProRes 422 render files, not the source media files. So in a sense it has already been transcoded.

However there are some bugs in the render tracking system so this does not always happen. It would be safer to transcode to optimized media within FCPX. If that transcode hangs or the clips look malformed, then he should state that.

All we know is it was "filmed on iPhones". Some of those record in HEVC. There are some issues with FCPX in 10.4.7 and 10.4.8 in handling some HEVC codecs, although I haven't seen it on an iPhone myself.

joema wrote: [quote="DaveF" post=107317]I had a similar problem recently, in the end, I converted the iPhone footage to ProRes with ff-Works then imported to FCPX and that sorted it.

The OP apparently rendered the timeline -- it's blurry but I can't see any render dots. If rendered, all playback and subsequent export encoding is generally from the ProRes 422 render files, not the source media files. So in a sense it has already been transcoded. MyCFAVisit

However there are some bugs in the render tracking system so this does not always happen. It would be safer to transcode to optimized media within FCPX. If that transcode hangs or the clips look malformed, then he should state that.

All we know is it was "filmed on iPhones". Some of those record in HEVC. There are some issues with FCPX in 10.4.7 and 10.4.8 in handling some HEVC codecs, although I haven't seen it on an iPhone myself.[/quote]

Thank you for posting something like this

The footage is .mov HEVC (h.265).

Premiere Pro says it supports h.265 files now in the latest releases, but it's a no go with iPhone XS h.265 footage.

I tried encoding them to h.264 and it didn't help, all that did was bake in the glitches...... Also tried the files on both my Macbook Pro and my Windows 10 PC. Same issue on both systems.