Best format for exporting from Resolve?

[spoRv]

But isn't ProRes lossy?

[williarob]

Yes, prores is technically lossy, meaning if you compress to prores and then uncompress your final video will not have the same checksum as your input video, but Prores 444 or even 422HQ is visually lossless and an industry standard for that reason.

I have tried it - I exported a file as prores and then brought it into After Effects and placed it on top of the lossless original DPX files, and toggling the layer on and off I couldn't see any differences at all, even when zoomed way in or using the difference blend mode. To the naked eye they were identical, even if the actual bits/bytes are not.

Of course, you can also export as a lossless Tif sequence from Virtualdub and import that into Resolve too, it's just a question of how much disk space you have. If you have enough to do image squence into Resolve AND out of Resolve, you can then bring it back into Virtualdub and save it with a lossless codec, delete the image sequence and free up some space.

I prefer MagicYUV to Lagarith, because it supports 444 color subsampling and 8-14 bit RGB.

[deleted user]

I export from Virtualdub using Virtualdub 2 because it has a built in (reverse engineered) Apple Prores codec and allows me to save it in a Quicktime container. That combination works extremely well when importing into Resolve.

Holy s*** I had no idea. I've been using VirtualDub2 all this time without noticing this. Thanks!

Edit:

I prefer MagicYUV to Lagarith, because it supports 444 color subsampling and 8-14 bit RGB.

Have you tried MagicYUV with higher depth color spaces? I read about it online but was put off by the price tag and the fact that I couldn't find any reviews to justify trusting the site.

[williarob]

I have tried MagicYUV with higher depth color spaces, and I didn't see any issues with it. I will say that there are a lot of options to choose from when selecting the codec in virtualdub, and not all of them will work well in other programs, such as Resolve or Premiere. So if you want to try it out, get the demo, and test it on a short video to make sure the options you selected are compatible with your workflow.

I was initially put off by the fact that it wasn't free too, but I tested the demo and was satisfied that it was worth the $14 price tag. The transaction went smoothly, though I think it may have taken up to 48 hours before I received my download link for the full version, which seemed like a long time.

[deleted user]

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I tried it now and it seems reliable in VDub 2, but it doesn't support high bit-depth in Premiere, so the use cases are sadly very limited for me. I wonder if it's possible to write a wrapper around it for Premiere, maybe the guy who made that x264 exporter could figure out a way.