BEST YOUTUBE RENDER SETTINGS IN RESOLVE 17 - DaVinci Resolve Basics Tutorial

[Music] goodness i'm casey ferris i make videos on davinci resolve here on youtube make sure to subscribe for more of that hey make sure to subscribe for more of that why haven't you done that watching all my videos ain't subscribed come on anyway today we're talking about render settings and science scientific america or wherever you live what are the best render settings for youtube well why don't we just find out long story short every time i post a render settings video i get comments like well actually if you were to uh up the bit rate or actually this is way too high of a bit rate or actually if you were to upscale or actually if you'd be well i decided to put an end to all of that and actually test out the best settings for a youtube video in resolve 17. so if you want the answer it's common but first some science science science science science [Music] so i set out to answer that question what are the best settings for youtube out of davinci resolve and really the only way that you can actually test this is render the same video with a whole bunch of different settings and upload it to youtube a bunch of times and then look at each of those and compare them so what i did was made sure each of them were playing in the highest quality and i captured the screen with a really high quality recorder so that it didn't add a bunch of compression or anything and then i brought it into resolve and pixel peeped and went crazy for a good a good while did that quite a bit but i did find out some interesting stuff i can pair details on skin tones and hair little details like foliage see how well low contrast colors gradate how blotchy things seem to be i looked at details and textures stuff with low motion stuff with high motion i tried to get just a big general idea of how each codec and how each setting actually performs in the real world not just theory not just on a certain type of footage but just all around and i won't take you through the hundreds of comparisons i actually did i'll give you the too long didn't read right and i'll show you the differences on this uh gameplay clip because that's where the differences seem to be the most apparent things with not a whole lot of motion something like this shot you don't see a real big difference honestly between the codex you don't see a huge difference with the higher bitrates it all looks real similar but where you do see a huge difference is with footage that has a lot of motion and a lot of detail one of the codecs that i rendered was dnxhr which is a very high quality codec that youtube accepts and it makes sense that this would look really nice because it's not compressed as much as very nice very light compression this is the kind of codec that you would use to like archive your film and that kind of thing so it really should give us the best shot for quality and it pretty much did these were far and above the best looking uploads but the size is huge it's like 10 times the size of the other codecs we tested h.264 and h.265 so is it worth it well we'll get to that in a second uh the next one i did a lot of testing on is h.264 tested different data rates and as you can imagine if we switch back and forth between dnxhr and h264 h.264 is a lot more blocky dnxhr you can see a lot of these little details a little better they're a little bit chunky anyway but everything's kind of just smoothed out in a way that may or may not be exactly what you want when it comes to the h.264 h.265 had actually similar results to dnxhr it looks very similar at the higher data rates and just for an hd upload h.265 definitely seems to be just about as good as dnxhr if it's rendered at you know 50 or 60 megabits per second where it really gets interesting though is when you upscale this is the same exact clip it's recorded in hd but this is just an hd upload this is a uhd upscaled upload look at the difference it absolutely blew my mind and i did not think it would be that big of a difference but it really is and even though it's the same source footage it seems like youtube gives it maybe a higher data rate on the compression that it adds which might end up making this look so much better throughout this whole test everything that is upscaled to uhd looks better across the board than something that's uploaded in hd again same exact source footage it's no comparison uhd upscale definitely worth it so after i kind of figured that out i did a whole bunch more tests with the codex of course dnxhr looks the best and h.264 at pretty high data rates looks similar but you do get like some of the details back here smoothed out a little bit with h.264 which may or may not be a big deal to some people depending on the shot you can notice a small difference or a big difference in some of the details and especially like things that don't have a whole lot of contrast uh get kind of blocky with the h264 and that totally makes sense because that's just how that compression works now when you get to h.265 you almost can't tell the difference between h.265 and dnxhr you just about can't tell the difference which is interesting because dnxhr like this upload right here this dnxhr is two and a half gigs for 30 seconds and h.265 at these settings is 224 megabytes so it's much much smaller it's about 10 times smaller for just about the same quality after it's uploaded to youtube and converted and all that stuff if you really did do some pixel peeping like you really got in close you can see a difference right like you can see a difference between the two but is that practically going to matter i would say probably not i would say you get just a tiny more detail with dnxhr it's a little bit blockier with the h265 but now if we boost up the megabits per second with h265 because that was at 60 megabits per second here we have 100 megabits per second and all the tests i've found around 100 megabits per second or more looks almost exactly like dnxhr for like an eighth of the file size and of course h.264 compared to h.265 it's like no contest h.265 at the same megabits per second versus h264 h264 is like noticeably worse you can really tell like here in the lines this line sharp this line is kind of bleh and i know this example is kind of not quite synced but i've played with this a lot and believe me it's a big big difference between those two especially at the lower bit rates now a couple things that i learned about rendering h.265 is that on windows this is only available on the studio version so you do have to upgrade to studio in order to render h.265 but the good news is if you have a mac it actually has the ability in the free version and apparently this is because of complicated licensing things and i don't know but if you're on windows you have to upgrade to studio if you're using the free version i would still recommend probably h.264 uprest to uhd at a similar data rate that's still going to be pretty good quality but if you do have the studio version or if you're on a mac the h.265 looks great so let's take a look at some scientific findings shall we after doing all of these tests here's some scientific findings which codec should i use these are the three that i tested i know there are more codecs there i'm sure i'll get comments about why didn't i test whatever codec but these were the ones that i thought probably had the best shot of being really useful and we found not surprisingly dnxhr very nice but huge files h.264 has low file size but it also has low quality and the h.265 is almost dnxhr quality when you have it at the higher bit rates but it's about the size of h.264 it's actually a little smaller most of the time and i found that at least on my system h.265 renders about twice as fast so it's kind of the clear winner here it looks better it's a smaller file size and it renders faster why wouldn't you use that so h.265 seems to be the way to go one big thing that surprised me how much of a difference it made is upscaling content so should i upscale my content to uhd even if it's shot in hd yes it 100 makes a huge difference if you can do it if you can afford the render time if your system can do it if you can upload a little bigger file if you're looking for quality that is the way to get it the other thing i tested a lot which we didn't have a bunch of examples in this video but believe me this is what i found higher bit rates look nicer pretty much the higher you go it always looks nicer but it starts to get only just negligibly nicer when you get to about twice the frame rate in megabits this is in h.265 at uhd so at 24 frames a second if you were going to render something at like 10 000 kilobits it looks just okay 25 looks a lot better and 50 looks a lot better than that but you know 50 versus 100 not a huge difference similar for 30p the higher the bitrate the better it looks until around 60 or so and then it just kind of seems like overkill same thing for 60p around 120 or so that's about the sweet spot between it actually making a difference i did one test at h.265 uhd at 60p at 100 megabits per second versus 150 and you just i mean you can't tell the difference practically but you can tell the difference between 150 so i'd say this is about where the sweet spot is is about twice the frame rate so that's a nice easy way to remember it so if we're gonna render a movie for youtube from davinci resolve here's what i would recommend like i've suggested in previous videos what i like to do is switch to the youtube preset and then back to custom but i'm going to scroll down leave the format at quicktime and under codec we're going to switch to h.265 this again is for a 1080p project resolution i would go to ultra hd even if stuff is hd upscale it to ultra hd of course if you have an ultra hd timeline this is a great choice and then for quality for h.264 i've recommended 30 000 in the past and that does look pretty good but after all of these findings and science and stuff and since we're rendering ultra hd we want to do about double our frame rate so whatever our frame rate is for the project this is 24 frames do about 50. or you could do 47.9999 or whatever if you want to but about twice you could go 60 somewhere in there i'm going to leave that at 50 000 and everything else is pretty much fine by default so when you're ready just go ahead and click add to render queue and this thing will pop up and it'll say are you sure you want to upscale your stuff like are you like this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense man and you say yep i'm gonna add it because we know we know don't we we sure do that's gonna give you the best looking youtube render for an hd project in the year 2020 2021 with davinci resolve 17. see i told you there'd be science i told you anyway these are the best settings that i've found but of course if you have other opinions you can use the internet to share them without fear of being judged or having to be nice here's more videos on resolve 17 and i just think that you look nice today see if you want a good pickup line be like babe you look like you were upscaled to uhd that's how i met my wife no it's not it was a pity date

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 78,278

Keywords: davinci resolve 17, render settings, youtube, best practice, davinci resolve tutorial, video editing, resolve 17, best render settings, davinci resolve tutorial video editing, resolve 17 new features, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, tutorial, best YouTube settings

Id: _7KFuCN8oz0

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020