I’m filming a project on my iPhone XS Max, so my videos are saved as .mov files, even after transferring them to my pc. The issue I am finding though is that when I insert a .mov file into my timeline and preview the video, the whole program gets laggy. It hasn’t crashed like it has for some people. Just gets laggy. The only way I’ve gotten rid of that problem so far is to convert it to .mp4, but I feel like I’m losing precious quality when I do that. Anyone have suggestions on something else I can do to fix this? I am new to shotcut, so you might need to be patient with me 
Try converting it to edit-friendly before editing it.
In the Properties panel, click on the Hamburger Menu and then choose “Convert to Edit friendly”. It will be a very large file. Does that file play more smoothly…
A mov is only a “container”, who knows what codec (and bit rate) Apple uses in those movs.
@Elusien is right, try converting to “edit friendly” as per post above.
I have an unverified theory why this is: your iPhone has efficient encoding of video files (probably thanks to a specialized chip, meaning that the video files can have good quality at small size thanks to it. However the decoding of these files is more complicated, meaning your computer’s CPU has to work harder to decode them (decoding is required to see a video - you could also imagine it as “decompressing” a zip file more or less efficiently, trading processing intensity vs zip file size).
The solution is to convert it to a file format that is easier on the CPU. Shotcut provides a feature for this built-in, as @Elusien explained.
The process is also shown around 0:40 in this dramatic video and I think it compares the usefulness of the three options:
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Ah awesome I didn’t even know that was a feature! I’m at work right now but when I get back I’ll definitely give that a try and see if that helps! I’ll keep you updated! Thanks so much!
So I gave that a try… the only one that SOMEWHAT fixed it was the “good” quality (MP4). But even then it still was slow and having issues. And lost a lot of quality as well. Any other ideas? Not sure if this info helps but the video I’m trying to work with is a 4K video at 60 fps. Recorded through an app called ProMovie. Not the built in camera app.
So the limitating factor is your computer and its capacities…
Shouldn’t be though. I’m using a Dell G3 gaming laptop, so even though it’s a bit older, it does have some decent processing power.
You could try going to “Settings” and unsetting the option “Realtime (frame dropping)”
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