Best Importing Settings of DJI Phantom 3/4 4K for Premiere Pro CC

4K footage and Premiere Pro CC

I'm wondering if anyone out there has experience with the 4K footage the Phantom 3 produces and how it plays with Premiere Pro CC. Does Premiere Pro CC import the footage natively, or does it have to be converted first? Thanks.

Premiere Pro CC

Workflow of DJI Phantom 4K with Premiere Pro CC

Over the last few years, Adobe Premiere Pro has made some major updates and the Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015.1 brings one the most significant new features - the expanded native support for 4K Ultra HD including Avid DNxHR, HEVC(H.265). The 4K MP4/MOV video recorded by DJI Phantom 3/4 are compressed with MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec, which is are included in Adobe Premiere Pro supported file formats list.

However, for those people who wish to get a high performance and high quality workflow, editing DJI Phantom 4K H.264 with Premiere Pro CC won't be a good choice. The main reason is that H.264 has the following limitations when using as an editing codec:
1. H.264 is mathematically intense. It takes some serious computer horsepower to decode its compression.
2. Because it is so mathematically challenging, it takes longer to render H.264 files than other formats.
3. H.264, as shot by HDSLR cameras, is an 8-bit format, which means that you are potentially compromising your effects and, especially, color correction and compositing with gradients.
4. H.264 does not integrate easily with other video formats.

Therefore, you are recommended to transcode DJI Phantom 4K to a more compatible and less hardware entensive format. Here, you can achieve that with Pavtube HD Video Converter for Mac (review), which helps to directly encode DJI Phantom 3/4 4K H.264 to Adobe Premiere Pro CC specially optimized MPEG-2 editing codec with all the compatible editing settings such as video codec/resolution/bit rate/frame rate and audio codec/bit rate/sample rate/channles, etc.

Besides converting DJI Phantom 4K for editing with Premiere Pro CC, you can also use the program to transcode DJI Phantom 4K to the best formats for viewing on 4K TV, uploading to YouTube/Facebook/Vimeo or loading into FCP, Davinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer, etc for smooth video editing.

For windows users, you can turn to Pavtube HD Video Converter to get the conversion done on Windows 10/8/8.1/7.

How to Import and Edit DJI Phantom 3/4 4K with Adobe Premiere Pro CC?

Step 1: Transfer DJI Phantom 3/4 4K recorded footage to Mac computer.

The DJI Phantom 3/4 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 Mac computer SD card Port for transferring the video footage to your Mac local hard drive.

Step 2: Import DJI Phantom 3/4 4K videos.

From "File"drop-down option, select "add Video/Audio"to add source DJI Phantom 3/4 4K video files to the program.

Step 3: Output Premiere Pro optimized file format.

Click the "Format" bar and switch to "Adobe Premiere/Sony.." option and select "MPEG-2(*.mpg)" as the output format for non-linear post work-flows in Premiere Pro CC.

Step 4: Start video conversion process.

When all the setting is completed, go back to the main interface, hit right-bottom "Convert" button to start DJI Phantom 3/4 4K video to Premiere Pro CC optimized MPEG-2 codec conversion process.

When the conversion is completed, you will have no problems to import 4k video to Premiere Pro CC for professional video editing on both Windows and Mac.

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