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Test video taken in Bridgeton, In, color corrected with DaVinci Resolve 15

Maybe I'm not following what the last few posts are getting at, but let me verify this- I can make all of the trims, cuts, changes, and color grading i want in a program like resolve without losing anything at all (due to encoding) until the final render, correct? I understand when you alter color, contrast and so on you can lose detail, but I dont think that's what's being talked about here. The reason i ask is, if that's the case, why would these secondary programs be needed?
 
YuKay said:
I'll add a shout-out for a free cross-platform video trimming tool called LosslessCut. Simple to use, it can be useful for rough cuts of drone video (accurate only to the closest keyframe), enabling you, for example, to remove unwanted footage or extract a clip from an existing MP4 video without any further encoding. In some circumstances, this can preserve video quality by eliminating the need to run it through a codec again after editing.
Click to expand...
Looks similar to boilsoft video splitter. Not gonna hurt to have two and see which I like better. Thanks.
 
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YuKay said:
I'll add a shout-out for a free cross-platform video trimming tool called LosslessCut. Simple to use, it can be useful for rough cuts of drone video (accurate only to the closest keyframe), enabling you, for example, to remove unwanted footage or extract a clip from an existing MP4 video without any further encoding. In some circumstances, this can preserve video quality by eliminating the need to run it through a codec again after editing.
Click to expand...
Not trying to hijack the thread but a big thank you for this again. I've put it side by side with Boilsoft and I find it much better. It will now be my go to.
 
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Apollo11capcom said:
Maybe I'm not following what the last few posts are getting at, but let me verify this- I can make all of the trims, cuts, changes, and color grading i want in a program like resolve without losing anything at all (due to encoding) until the final render, correct? I understand when you alter color, contrast and so on you can lose detail, but I dont think that's what's being talked about here. The reason i ask is, if that's the case, why would these secondary programs be needed?
Click to expand...
Not everyone has the time, inclination or skill to use a full-blown program and the free or built-in video tools tend to be pretty limited, so a quick/easy/lossless video trimming tool would be useful for them.

And not everyone has infinite storage space to archive all their footage. When idiots like me shoot endless Gigabytes of rubbish footage, we may only want to archive a clip or two and trash the rest. This tool is great for quickly and easily eliminating the dross from my footage before ever loading it into a proper editor. Pre-eliminating the dross also makes all editing/processing software run better.

Even for those who own all the tools and know how to use them, once you have loaded all your footage into a project file, you are committed to keeping that project file and all the footage forever. If you archive an MP4 out of your editing software, you are losing data to compression. If instead you archive in a lossless codec, you are exponentially increasing your file sizes. Yesterday, I rendered a 200MB 60-second MP4 clip as a ProRes video and the new file size was 8GB!

I have also occasionally started working on an editing project in the wrong program, without thinking ahead. If you're mid-way through the project and realise that the effect, transition or output format you require is only available in another program, you could be in trouble unless you have the time and the option to save a lossless version of your video to import into the other program.

I would like to do quick trims and clips in Apple Quicktime Player before moving onto a proper editor - but there is no way to export losslessly or as a project file from the standard Quicktime Player to another editor, not even to iMovie.

Also, if you're on the road with your drone and a laptop, you could easily run out of disk space (or microSD cards). Easy quick fix is to losslessly trim your drone footage as you go, using a simple tool like this.

I'm currently using a digitiser to convert some very old VHS video tapes to digital video so that I can archive them on DVDs. There are around 50 1-hour tapes and since they were shot by me, only a few minutes on each tape is worth archiving. I could capture the video losslessly (until I run out of space) but the modest quality of the footage doesn't justify that and it would take forever. So I capture in MP4 and use LosslessCut to quickly trim them down before burning the DVDs using Toast. Resolve isn't a full-scale NLE and doesn't offer a convenient/direct route to burning a DVD.
 
YuKay said:
Not everyone has the time, inclination or skill to use a full-blown program and the free or built-in video tools tend to be pretty limited, so a quick/easy/lossless video trimming tool would be useful for them.

And not everyone has infinite storage space to archive all their footage. When idiots like me shoot endless Gigabytes of rubbish footage, we may only want to archive a clip or two and trash the rest. This tool is great for quickly and easily eliminating the dross from my footage before ever loading it into a proper editor. Pre-eliminating the dross also makes all editing/processing software run better.

Even for those who own all the tools and know how to use them, once you have loaded all your footage into a project file, you are committed to keeping that project file and all the footage forever. If you archive an MP4 out of your editing software, you are losing data to compression. If instead you archive in a lossless codec, you are exponentially increasing your file sizes. Yesterday, I rendered a 200MB 60-second MP4 clip as a ProRes video and the new file size was 8GB!

I have also occasionally started working on an editing project in the wrong program, without thinking ahead. If you're mid-way through the project and realise that the effect, transition or output format you require is only available in another program, you could be in trouble unless you have the time and the option to save a lossless version of your video to import into the other program.

I would like to do quick trims and clips in Apple Quicktime Player before moving onto a proper editor - but there is no way to export losslessly or as a project file from the standard Quicktime Player to another editor, not even to iMovie.

Also, if you're on the road with your drone and a laptop, you could easily run out of disk space (or microSD cards). Easy quick fix is to losslessly trim your drone footage as you go, using a simple tool like this.

I'm currently using a digitiser to convert some very old VHS video tapes to digital video so that I can archive them on DVDs. There are around 50 1-hour tapes and since they were shot by me, only a few minutes on each tape is worth archiving. I could capture the video losslessly (until I run out of space) but the modest quality of the footage doesn't justify that and it would take forever. So I capture in MP4 and use LosslessCut to quickly trim them down before burning the DVDs using Toast. Resolve isn't a full-scale NLE and doesn't offer a convenient/direct route to burning a DVD.
Click to expand...
I understand, I guess I probably should have just taken those posts as "by the way" instead of within context of the thread in general. My question wasn't intended to assume anything about anyone's preferred method of operation or choice of software.
 
Apollo11capcom said:
I understand, I guess I probably should have just taken those posts as "by the way" instead of within context of the thread in general. My question wasn't intended to assume anything about anyone's preferred method of operation or choice of software.
Click to expand...
I was responding to your edit note to your OP and your subsequent question about my 'over-processing' comment. There's a discussion here about the best way to do colour grading without losing quality.

In any event, we're on a sticky wicket if we edit or colour grade H.264 footage which has little headroom for colour work and runs clunky in an editor. Most pros would transcode to a lossless format such as ProRes before working on H.264 footage. Amateurs don't often bother but it seems counter-intuitive to devote time to editing or grading footage which can't easily be worked on - and camera-processed H.264 won't absorb much colour grading before your efforts begin to introduce artifacts. Hence, if I'm filming for fun, I try to get everything right in the camera and never touch the footage after that except for simple editing. But if I were commissioned to do commercial videography, I would always shoot in Log to give me more headroom later for colour grading and correction.
 
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YuKay said:
I was responding to your edit note to your OP and your subsequent question about my 'over-processing' comment. There's a discussion here about the best way to do colour grading without losing quality.

In any event, we're on a sticky wicket if we edit or colour grade H.264 footage which has little headroom for colour work and runs clunky in an editor. Most pros would transcode to a lossless format such as ProRes before working on H.264 footage. Amateurs don't often bother but it seems counter-intuitive to devote time to editing or grading footage which can't easily be worked on - and camera-processed H.264 won't absorb much colour grading before your efforts begin to introduce artifacts. Hence, if I'm filming for fun, I try to get everything right in the camera and never touch the footage after that except for simple editing. But if I were commissioned to do commercial videography, I would always shoot in Log to give me more headroom later for colour grading and correction.
Click to expand...
Ah, I understand... I didn't know that about h264, but it answers questions I had about why i was getting artifacts so easily.
 
YuKay said:
I was responding to your edit note to your OP and your subsequent question about my 'over-processing' comment. There's a discussion here about the best way to do colour grading without losing quality.

In any event, we're on a sticky wicket if we edit or colour grade H.264 footage which has little headroom for colour work and runs clunky in an editor. Most pros would transcode to a lossless format such as ProRes before working on H.264 footage. Amateurs don't often bother but it seems counter-intuitive to devote time to editing or grading footage which can't easily be worked on - and camera-processed H.264 won't absorb much colour grading before your efforts begin to introduce artifacts. Hence, if I'm filming for fun, I try to get everything right in the camera and never touch the footage after that except for simple editing. But if I were commissioned to do commercial videography, I would always shoot in Log to give me more headroom later for colour grading and correction.
Click to expand...
I read through the post you linked to and was inspired to try a couple tests... with some interesting results- I opened one of the files I was having the most trouble with, and after some minor editing I rendered to CineForm. After that I took that file and did color grading and white balancing and rendered to CineForm, and H.264. The final rendition in CineForm looks like it really took care of most (if not all) of the artifact issues I was having. The H.264 rendering still looks like poop. So to get the best results so far, my workflow looks something like this:

H.264 original file > Resolve editing/effects > render to CineForm > Resolve color grading, white balance, etc. > render to CineForm

Or I suppose (assume) I could do this with the same results:

H.264 original file > Resolve render to CineForm > Resolve editing/effects, color grading, white balance, etc. > render to CineForm

CineForm

H.264

I still haven't been able to get it back to h.264 with it looking decent, I'm sure I'll figure that out with more trial and error.
 
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The Cineform intermediate is a massive improvement! Clear skies! Did you upload it directly to Youtube? Why do you need to convert back to H.264?
 
YuKay said:
The Cineform intermediate is a massive improvement! Clear skies! Did you upload it directly to Youtube? Why do you need to convert back to H.264?
Click to expand...
File size is the only reason. The CineForm version took over 2 hours to upload, the h.264 took a matter of minutes.
 
Apollo11capcom said:
File size is the only reason. The CineForm version took over 2 hours to upload, the h.264 took a matter of minutes.
Click to expand...
The key variable is Bitrate and it's known that Youtube inflicts less damage on high Bitrate uploads than low Bitrate. I'm not sure from memory what Bitrate options Resolve offers for H.264 encoding but if it allows you to specify what you want, you might try experimenting with higher Bitrate H.264 My editor's typical Bitrate for standard 4k60 H.264 encodes is around 30Mbps but upping that to to 50Mbps manually will produce a much cleaner video and also one which Youtube should treat with more respect (I use a utility called MediaInfo to find out the Bitrate of a rendered video).

But if instead Youtube only defers to "pro" codecs while assuming that all H.264 uploads are rubbish anyway, then uploading in a posh codec will remain your best option.

If file size is a killer, then experiment with another HQ codec which offers more Bitrate options. ProRes comes in different flavours, offering varying Bitrates and file sizes.

And if you are as serious about video quality as you sound then you would anyway want to archive your work in one of the HQ codecs (which, if you have the horsepowers to play them, are also much easier to edit).
 
YuKay said:
The key variable is Bitrate and it's known that Youtube inflicts less damage on high Bitrate uploads than low Bitrate. I'm not sure from memory what Bitrate options Resolve offers for H.264 encoding but if it allows you to specify what you want, you might try experimenting with higher Bitrate H.264 My editor's typical Bitrate for standard 4k60 H.264 encodes is around 30Mbps but upping that to to 50Mbps manually will produce a much cleaner video and also one which Youtube should treat with more respect (I use a utility called MediaInfo to find out the Bitrate of a rendered video).

But if instead Youtube only defers to "pro" codecs while assuming that all H.264 uploads are rubbish anyway, then uploading in a posh codec will remain your best option.

If file size is a killer, then experiment with another HQ codec which offers more Bitrate options. ProRes comes in different flavours, offering varying Bitrates and file sizes.

And if you are as serious about video quality as you sound then you would anyway want to archive your work in one of the HQ codecs (which, if you have the horsepowers to play them, are also much easier to edit).
Click to expand...
Resolve by default renders h.264 at 10 Mbps, but I've been bumping it up to 30. Just for fun I re-rendered the same clip coded in h.264 and jacked it up to 100 Mbps, just to see what the result would be.

H.264 at 100 Mbps

I was doing some reading on CineForm vs. ProRes and it seems like quite a few people preferred CineForm- or at least they did at the time the post was written. In addition to that, CineForm is already included in Resolve whereas ProRes isn't.

A couple questions- Do any of the programs mentioned earlier in this thread encode to ProRes, and what do you think about switching my recording settings on my Evo from h.264 to h.265, would there be any benefit going that route?
 
Apollo11capcom said:
Resolve by default renders h.264 at 10 Mbps, but I've been bumping it up to 30. Just for fun I re-rendered the same clip coded in h.264 and jacked it up to 100 Mbps, just to see what the result would be.



I was doing some reading on CineForm vs. ProRes and it seems like quite a few people preferred CineForm- or at least they did at the time the post was written. In addition to that, CineForm is already included in Resolve whereas ProRes isn't.

A couple questions- Do any of the programs mentioned earlier in this thread encode to ProRes, and what do you think about switching my recording settings on my Evo from h.264 to h.265, would there be any benefit going that route?
Click to expand...
Good test. H.264 at 100Mbps is better than the original upload but inferior to the Cineform upload.

I just took a look at my (free) Mac version of Davinci Resolve 15 and it appears to offer ProRes encoding options. Moreover, according to this, it seems to be officially licensed to do so. The free Ffmpeg will also claim to encode in ProRes but that's a reverse-engineered unlicensed version which probably wouldn't be trusted in a pro workflow.

I think Cineform is good. It is preferred by some Windows users because ProRes was developed by the arch enemy and may indeed run better/easier in Mac workflows.

Imho, H.265 is superior to H.264. It delivers better colour and detail in a smaller file size. But it requires an enabled graphics card or software decoding which is very processor-intensive compared to H.264. Some of the issues are discussed here.

Youtube will accept H.265 uploads but transcode them to their proprietary codecs, with mixed results since there is less data for them to play with.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in Autel's implementation of H.265. At least in my EVO, it can't produce smooth yaws at any speed. Autel are investigating. I would be interested to hear about your results if you test it.

Your 10Mbps H.264 from Resolve was presumably for a 30fps video?
 
YuKay said:
Good test. H.264 at 100Mbps is better than the original upload but inferior to the Cineform upload.

I just took a look at my (free) Mac version of Davinci Resolve 15 and it appears to offer ProRes encoding options. Moreover, according to this, it seems to be officially licensed to do so. The free Ffmpeg will also claim to encode in ProRes but that's a reverse-engineered unlicensed version which probably wouldn't be trusted in a pro workflow.

I think Cineform is good. It is preferred by some Windows users because ProRes was developed by the arch enemy and may indeed run better/easier in Mac workflows.

Imho, H.265 is superior to H.264. It delivers better colour and detail in a smaller file size. But it requires an enabled graphics card or software decoding which is very processor-intensive compared to H.264. Some of the issues are discussed here.

Youtube will accept H.265 uploads but transcode them to their proprietary codecs, with mixed results since there is less data for them to play with.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in Autel's implementation of H.265. At least in my EVO, it can't produce smooth yaws at any speed. Autel are investigating. I would be interested to hear about your results if you test it.

Your 10Mbps H.264 from Resolve was presumably for a 30fps video?
Click to expand...
I guess it makes sense that Mac Resolve has ProRes and Windows Resolve doesn't. Maybe there's a licensing hangup there that wouldn't allow it to be free with ProRes. Idk, just a guess, but it sounds plausible.

I wasn't thinking about rendering to h.265, just recording... as a matter of fact, I can't even find a way to render to h.265 on Resolve. I will give it a shot on my Evo, at least with a few test shots to see if I'm getting the same issue while yawing.

The test clip I've been using was (I believe) shot at 60fps, but I've been bumping up to 30 Mbps, I haven't used 10 in any of the tests, unless it was by accident. Hopefully the weather will start cooperating, once it does I'll post my results with 265.
 
YuKay said:
Good test. H.264 at 100Mbps is better than the original upload but inferior to the Cineform upload.

I just took a look at my (free) Mac version of Davinci Resolve 15 and it appears to offer ProRes encoding options. Moreover, according to this, it seems to be officially licensed to do so. The free Ffmpeg will also claim to encode in ProRes but that's a reverse-engineered unlicensed version which probably wouldn't be trusted in a pro workflow.

I think Cineform is good. It is preferred by some Windows users because ProRes was developed by the arch enemy and may indeed run better/easier in Mac workflows.

Imho, H.265 is superior to H.264. It delivers better colour and detail in a smaller file size. But it requires an enabled graphics card or software decoding which is very processor-intensive compared to H.264. Some of the issues are discussed here.

Youtube will accept H.265 uploads but transcode them to their proprietary codecs, with mixed results since there is less data for them to play with.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in Autel's implementation of H.265. At least in my EVO, it can't produce smooth yaws at any speed. Autel are investigating. I would be interested to hear about your results if you test it.

Your 10Mbps H.264 from Resolve was presumably for a 30fps video?
Click to expand...
So here's my first attempt dealing with H.265, I had to download Microsoft's "HVEC video extensions" to even get it to play on my laptop, but once I did...wow! Man does it look amazing, even without any editing at all. Here's a clip of what I'm working with on YT... it loses a lot in the YT translation but you can kinda get the idea.

Btw- I didn't see any issues while yawing in the video, but I don't really know what I'm looking for either...


Unless I run into some sort of roadblock, I think maybe I'll stick with it.
 

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