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Xiaomi Yi 4k camera, anyone?!

E

Evaunitross

Hey guys and gals, I really hope someone can give me some advice because I'm really stuck.

Hey everybody, I had been using a GoPro for a couple years and I liked GoPro Studio for video editing. That is the only video editing experience I have. I do outdoors videos while hiking. Unfortunately I lost my GoPro in a mini-avalanche, so I bought a Xiaomi Yi 4k to replace it. The Yi 4k produces three types of files for each video shot. These are .MP4, .THM, and _thm.MP4

I have two questions:

1. When I play the videos on my computer, using VLC Media Player the .MP4 files look the clearest but play very choppy.
The _thm.MP4 files play fine but look kinda poor quality.
The .THM files are not video files. Can anyone explain to me the differences between these file types?

2. What video editing software can I use to turn these files into movies?

I really appreciate any and all suggestions! Thanks!
 
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The .mp4 is your source video file. This is the one you should be using to edit. If playback is choppy, your computer is struggling.

The first thing to check is where the video file is stored: playback from an SD card can be choppy, so the media should be moved to a hard drive. Working media should not be stored on your computer’s internal drive, because running the OS + the eiditng software + reading the video file means the system can be bogged down as the drive is running all over the place trying to keep up. Keep your media on an external USB3 drive (PC) or Thunderbolt drive (Mac).

If you’re already doing all of that, you should check your computer’s specs (processor, processor speed, and RAM). Or, make sure your media drive isn’t past 80% full. Same with your boot drive.

The _thm.mp4 is a thumbnail reference movie. It’s highly-compressed, and is created for the camera to be able to play back quickly and efficiently. There’s no use for this file outside of that.

The .thm is a thumbnail image - a still frame from the head of the video. The camera uses this to show the index of videos, so you can identify each clip by its first frame of video.
 
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Hey, thank you for the quick reply! That helps! It's entirely possible that the choppy issue is due to my computer being not powerful enough.
In the past I've downloaded all the files to my computer (which if course took forever) and edited the video from there in GoPro Studio, when I was using the GoPro. Even then the GoPro Studio program would crash constantly. At this point it always crashes as soon as I open it so I gave up on trying to edit my old GoPro footage.

Are you able to recommend a video editing software for the .mp4 files? (talking about the Xiaomi Yi footage of course)
 
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If GoPro Studio crashes your computer, there’s no other recommendation I can make that will work. You need a better computer. What kind of computer are you running? Laptop or desktop? Mac or PC? Which processor, how much RAM?

And just out of curiosity, do you have an iPad (specifically, a more recent model bigger than 32GB)?
 
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