Why Can’t Edit DJI Mavic Air 4K with Final Cut Pro Smoothly? Solved!

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DJI has announced Mavic Air for many days, many DJI lovers are hesitating to buy this drone or not. The new $799 Mavic Air shares a lot of similarities with both the DJI Spark and the Mavic Pro and Pro Platinum. Like those models, it’s a compact drone with a 12-megapixel camera and a handful of different flying and shooting modes. The Air also has a couple of new tricks, like new obstacle avoidance technology. The another attractive trick is the Air shoots 4K video at 30 fps with a 100Mbps bitrate, compared to Pro’s 4K footage at 60Mbps.

On the one hand you can enjoy the super clear picture of the 4k video, on the other hand you may be painful when you try to edit the 4k footage with Final Cut Pro. Below is a question I got from a forum, let’s go check what’s he saying.

Why does your DJI Mavic Air 4K video look horrible in FCP?

"Hello, I just purchased a DJI Mavic Air camera, when I import the 4k video into Final Cut Pro, it looks blurry and pixely. However, when I view the same video out of the folder that it resides in, the video looks amazing. What am I doing wrong? I’m assuming I’m doing something wrong during the import process. Any suggestions? Thank you!"

The DJI Mavic Air shoots 4K video in MP4 or MOV (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC), which is not native editing codec for Final Cut Pro. In addition, the 4K video footage compressed with MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 will still have big file size, it will take a lot of time for Final Cut Pro to render those 4k videos. To ensure a smooth workflow of DJI Mavic Air 4K video with Final Cut Pro, it is ideal for you to transcode DJI Mavic Air 4K video to Final Cut Pro best editing codec – Apple Prores 422 codec, a post-production format designed for pristine quality and high-performance Final Cut Pro real-time editing.

You can performing DJI Mavic Air 4k video to Final Cut Pro transcoding process on Windows with Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate | for Mac, it allows you to intput 4K MOV, 4K MP4, 4K MKV, 4K XAVC even any 4K video formats to Apple ProRes 422 (*.mov), QuickTime(*.mov), H.264 MP4, H.264 M4V for Final Cut Pro.

Related topics: Best DJI Video Converter You Need Have One | Best Editing Workflow of DJI Osmo 4K Video with iMovie/FCE on Mac

How to import and edit DJI Mavic Air 4K video with FCP?

Step 1: Transfer DJI Mavic Air 4K recorded footage to your computer.

The DJI Mavic Air records footage on an SD card, you can remove the SD card from the camera, insert the SD card to a card reader, then plug in the card reader into your computer SD card Port for transferring the video footage to your local hard drive.

Step 2: Import DJI Mavic Air Professional 4K videos.

From "File"drop-down option, select "add Video/Audio"to add source DJI Mavic Air 4K video files to the program.

Step 3: Select output file format.

Click "Format"bar, from its drop-down list, select "Final Cut Pro"> "Apple Prores 422(*.mov)"as your desired output file format. H.264/H.265 MP4, H.264 MOV, H.264 M4V, AVI almost all Final Cut Pro supported video formats could be find in its formats list, go check by yoursevles.

Tips: After you have defined the output format, then cilck the Settings on the UI, in the pop-up window, you are able to adjust video/audio codec, resolution, bit rate, frame rate, channels, etc. To compress DJI Mavic Air 4k to 1080p by changing resolution from 3080*2160 to 1920*1080. To get smaller video file by lowering the video bit rate.

Step 4. Start the conversion

Start the DJI Mavic Air 4k to Apple ProRes 422(*.mov) conversion by pressing the red button Convert on the UI, wait for a while, go click "Open the Output Folder" to get the generated file. Now you are free to input the covnerted DJI Mavic Air 4k with Final Cut Pro for postproduction without any obstacles.

You can import and work with the following video, audio, and still-image formats in Final Cut Pro:

Final Cut Pro X: Final Cut Pro: Supported media formats

For information about formats you can export your movie to, see Supported export formats.