Best format for exporting from Resolve?

[bronan]

Cool I will give it a shot!

[X5gb]

Yeah, noticed that with h264 as well, went back to using mp4.

Premiere is pretty bitchy about h264 as well and will only process it properly in mp4 from my experience. Different containers will be read (even mkv in some newer versions) but have duplicate frames, frame skips etc., not reliable at all. h264 in mp4 is very reliable in Premiere tho, I wonder how Resolve handles it.

If you wanna try, install ffmpeg and run:

Code:

ffmpeg -i inputfile.whatever -an -vcodec copy output.mp4

Replace "inputfile.whatever" with your file that has the h264 in it, for example "myvideo.mov"

[bronan]

I tried importing an MP4 with 264 in it, then exporting and compared back to the original. Unfortunately, it still has 1 extra frame at the beginning for who knows what reason.

[bronan]

You aren't even lying. I just checked in Resolve and I can't select Lagarith either. Quite baffling, I did absolutely not expect this. First software ever that can't detect AVI Codecs.

With that said, if you have spare space, you could export lossless AVI and then use VirtualDub to losslessly convert to Lagarith and delete the uncompressed file.

You could also try HuffYUV, but honestly I don't have any high hopes for Resolve's AVI capabilities at this point. Looks like they use some proprietary stuff.

Edit: I also just realized yet another terribly weird thing about DaVinci's AVI export. It doesn't even have normal uncompressed 8-bit AVIs. It only has 2 YUV variants and one RGB variant and the RGB variant is 10-bit! How utterly strange. But at least that's the go-to option if you want guaranteed lossless and high bit depth then - 10-bit RGB uncompressed.

I tried a quick encode from Simple x264 with the DNxHR file and it seems to work great! I just loaded it as a FFVideoSource in my AVS script, is there anything else I should be worried about like colorspace or anything?

[deleted user]

I think you should be fine. I never worked with Simple x264 but if you stay in YUV colorspace I don't see what can go wrong. Specify Rec709 in the x264 encoding settings as well, just to be sure that it gets decoded properly as well upon playback.

Edit: goddammit I just wrote all the following shit and clicked on Cancel Edit accidentally and it deleted all of it. Pff, again lol.

If you want to do high bit-depth encodes, you will need AviSynth+ and 10-bit x264 tho.

If you have AviSynth+ anyway and your DNxHR was done at 10 or 12 bits, you can apply dithering to potentially improve the "perceived detail" of an 8 bit encode. You would do it with something like this:

Code:

yoursource.ConvertToYUV444().ConvertBits(8,dither=1)

You can read up the documentation of ConvertBits to see how the dither effectively works. The ConvertToYUV444 is just there to guarantee best possible quality processing at 4:4:4 color sampling, but I'm not sure if you will profit much from that if you do a 4:2:0 encode in the end. But I guess it can't hurt either way.

[williarob]

I've had a lot of headaches exporting from Resolve. For best results, export an image sequence of some kind - DPX or Tiff. If you don't have the disk space for that, I prefer the Cineform YUV codec to anything else: size is about the same as DnxHR, but I don't have the same problems with shifting black levels - with DnxHR, Adobe products usually see the black levels correctly (though not always), but ffmpeg/AviSynth/Virtualdub, etc nearly always messes up, resulting in either crushed blacks or milky blacks.

If you do take the Cineform route, you should also download and install the free GoPro Studio software - without that, you won't be able to preview your exports in MPC or Quicktime player, nor import it into many programs (it works fine with Adobe CC 2018 and later - maybe 2017 as well, but probably not with anything older than that unless the GoPro software is installed.)

The built in H264 encoder is awful - even with an insanely high bitrate and max quality, slowest setting there are horrible compression artifacts. If your video card is supported, and you can select Hardware encoding instead of software encoding, it is much better, but still not great.

[bronan]

Thanks a bunch for the info! I will give the Cineform YUV a shot the next time I export.

[Chewtobacca]

I prefer the Cineform YUV codec to anything else: size is about the same as DnxHR, but I don't have the same problems with shifting black levels...

Yeah, DNx is notorious for levels/gamma shifts. Avoid it like the plague.

[spoRv]

Which lossless format could I use with Virtualdub, to export to Resolve?
And which lossless format Resolve could export, to encode with an external encoder?

[williarob]

Which lossless format could I use with Virtualdub, to export to Resolve?
And which lossless format Resolve could export, to encode with an external encoder?

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.

Again, for export from Resolve, you can't go wrong with an image sequence, DPX or Tiff. Easy to bring into an Avisynth script and compatible with everything. The cineform option in an AVI or Quicktime container should also be universally compatible, as long as you install the free GoPro Studio on your system.

Resolve relies entirely on an internal suite of codecs, and completely ignores any others that may be installed on your system, like lagarith or MagicYUV. That's why you can't export as Lagarith, and why you still need to install the GoPro codecs separately if you want to use your export outside of Resolve or some other software (like Premiere CC 2018+) that also includes the codecs as part of the program.

There may be a way to add to the list of codecs it can use, perhaps by copying dlls into a Blackmagic folder, and/or updating an xml list somewhere, or it may all be hardcoded into the program - I haven't really looked into it.