Best way to convert MKV for use in DaVinci Resolve?

[Hitcher]

There's too many answers on Google from using FFmpeg to HandBrake so I thought I'd be better of asking here instead.

What do you use/do?

Thanks.

[Beber]

I use Shutter Encoder to encode to Prores so that it's easier and smoother to work on stuff. Or you can still use Shutter Encoder to just remux your h264 video into an mp4 container that Davinci Resolve will accept. H264 won't play as smoothly as Prores though.

[PDB]

I used ffmpeg to convert to prores

https://fanrestore.com/thread-3749-post-...l#pid68880

[Hitcher]

Thanks for the replies.

[deleted user]

If you don't have the space to spare, consider AVFS (hope that's the right name). You could wrap the h264 in an AVISynth script and then use AVFS to create a virtual AVI file on the hard drive out of that and load that into Resolve. I can't say how good the performance will be though. And you might have to fiddle with the color spaces to see which one will be accepted.

[pipefan413]

I used ffmpeg to convert to prores

https://fanrestore.com/thread-3749-post-...l#pid68880

If I may briefly hijack for a moment to ask a related question (and if I may not, please tell me to feck off, hahah): are there any Mac users in here? I've been wondering whether the Mac version of ffmpeg might encode using the native official ProRes encoder rather than the fmpeg one, but have thus far totally failed to find out the answer. I could've sworn I recalled having seen something that said you could literally just encode ProRes natively in command line in Mac OS X without having to download anything at all (including ffmpeg) but I can't find that again either so I might have made it up.

[Hitcher]

I use Shutter Encoder to encode to Prores so that it's easier and smoother to work on stuff.

Ok I must be doing something wrong I end up with a .mov file that's 4 times bigger than the original .mkv and it won't open in DaVinci.

[pipefan413]

I use Shutter Encoder to encode to Prores so that it's easier and smoother to work on stuff.

Ok I must be doing something wrong I end up with a .mov file that's 4 times bigger than the original .mkv and it won't open in DaVinci.

ProRes does generally go in a .mov container and is going to be much bigger than H.264 in an .mkv but I don't know why you can't get it to work in Resolve

[PDB]

To my knowledge and someone might know better, FFMPEG uses its own coding on both Mac and PC. I think to avoid certain copyright features.

[NeonBible]

On Mac you can simply right click on video files (mkv, mp4, mov etc) and convert to ProRes straight from there. It’s a bit rubbish though as you can’t see any progress, the resulting file will just grow and won’t even tell you when it’s finished. Don’t know about command line.