DaVinci Resolve BEST Export Settings Explained! 18.6 UPDATE

DaVinci Resolve 18.6 just dropped out of nowhere at blackmagic's announcements this week and with it comes an incredibly important export setting that I have been asking to come to resolve for years that adobe has had in premiere for quite a while relates to audio normalization we're going to cover all of this in today's video as I'm going to tell you all the important render settings you need to worry about when exporting your videos from DaVinci Resolve this will mainly focus on the studio version just because a lot of the GPU accelerated encoders that run on your graphics card aren't available in the free version and something seems to be amiss with what's available in 18.6 specifically but I'll put notes where you still want to learn this even if you're running on free it's still going to be super useful we'll get to the details as we jump in so first and foremost go to your project settings we want to optimize those real quick for a minute first and foremost I just want to note that you should have your cash your render cash video editing cash or whatever ideally on a SSD a fast Drive of some sort but theoretically it would be it would benefit you to run on a separate Drive than your footage is on with modern faster nvme ssds this isn't as big of a deal but one of the biggest kind of workflow improvements I get with Premiere or resolve is having my cash my footage and my render location on separate ssds or storage locations my actual footage is typically stored on network storage these days and it means that it's pulling reading and writing two separate drives which kind of distributes the load a little bit better because reading both cache and your Source footage from the same drive and then writing your render file back to that same drive is pretty taxing just for one drive to keep up with whereas if you separate all of your different kind of file types to different places it speeds things up a little bit in ways that is a little hard to track down but has made huge differences for my workflow over the past few years I've been using resolve since 2018 so for five years full time at this point I've really kind of learned the ins and outs and switched after using premiere for like 10 years resolve is my go-to these days in your project settings and you want to save a master project settings preset here for this that you call each time you open your project so you don't got to keep tweaking these things each time but you want to set your optimized media format and your render cache to be dnxhr if you're on Windows or GoPro xenophore either one works for you or if you're on Mac you want to use prores because that will use the prores hardware encoders and decoders that that Macs have these days and that will be most optimal for those platforms and for the render cache and the optimized media you ideally for the kind of workflow that I typically recommend you want to set those to original resolution that way you can use those for faster exports proxies you can set to whatever format and resolution you want usually like fourth resolution h.264 or something but for optimized media and render cache you want those to be basically the final output in terms of resolution just the beefier mezzanine codec so again dnxhr or maybe GoPro cineform on Windows and prores if you're on Mac jumping into the export settings stop using the MP4 container I've been trying to tell people this for a long time and it keeps coming up on Twitter whenever people want to improve their audio quality or whatever if you use the QuickTime container option in your export settings and resolve which uses the mov container you still have all the same codecs that MP4 has access to but you also get uncompressed PCM audio output which is literally as good as it gets which means you can send completely uncompressed audio to YouTube or whatever platform you're uploading to and virtually every platform supports it and that way you are keeping your audio completely uncompressed and untouched in terms of quality degradation until the final step there is no downside to this the file size impact is very minimal what you should be doing you also have the option to use MKV instead of mov for this which mostly has the same options also gives you av1 if you have access to that codec in your computer however MKV is a little more difficult to edit in certain other programs platforms like Twitter don't really support it for uploading other social media platforms might not YouTube accepts it fine and DaVinci Resolve can now edit MKV files and it mostly works fine but it's still not the best container overall for editing from so unless you're playing around a lot with av1 I typically recommend sticking to mov although everyone is supposed to be coming to mov at some point but now let's talk about your codec especially if you're on DaVinci Resolve Studio you should be using h.265 or av1 if you have access to it av1 is a new open source codec that is much more efficient in terms of file size and quality and all of that in the old school h264 codecs and things like that and h265 is a little bit older at this point but still significantly better in terms of the quality output you can get than h.264 there is no reason to upload h264 to virtually anything these days there are only downsides to it h.265 can give you smaller file sizes better quality and it works fine on YouTube Twitter Tick Tock Instagram and so on these days works perfectly fine and now if you have DaVinci Resolve studio and an AMD rx7000 series graphics card Nvidia RTX 4000 series or Intel arc graphics card you can use the hardware av1 encoder option as well which is going to be super freaking great but otherwise you want to be using h265 and your graphics card encoder now graphics card accelerated encoding is a feature that's supposed to be locked behind the paywall of DaVinci Resolve Studio which is what I said this mostly applies there intermittently since like 17.4 result for users have had access to GPU encoding just kind of unexpectedly and in the resolve 18.5 documentation they actually list the av1 hardware encoder as being available to free users however I've installed resolve 18.6 free on my test bench and my RPC now trying to record footage for this video and the gpuh264 and 5 encoders do not show up and the av1 encoder on the RTX 4000 series computer doesn't show up at all and that's actually supposed to shop in free so your mileage may vary there if you're running on free and you don't have access to h265 on a graphics card you can run it native but it's going to run a fair bit slower and you might want to stick with h.264 just keep in mind you're gonna have lower quality than others if you go with that option and that's unfortunate now I do want to say you can upload basically any codec you want to YouTube so if you can deal with the file sizes if you have fast internet or don't mind uploading overnight or something you can export to GoPro cineform dnxhr or prores from your computer with in the free version and upload that beefy lossless-ish file to YouTube and have the best quality you could possibly get it's just going to take a while to upload because they are really really big files I do that for some of my uploads all the time I used to do it more often but h.265 and av1 has gotten good enough at this point I don't need to but you do have that option available if you want to just bypass the quality degradation of the free codex available for Quality I know this seems like a cop-out but I have been again using resolve for five years full time now and I used to be someone who would constantly make guides on Min maxing quality settings in Premiere the automatic best quality selection and resolve is all you need you do not need to tweak anything we were talking 60 FPS gameplay 24 or 30 FPS talking head super VFX heavy shots screen captures whatever the automatic best profile works perfectly fine I do want to say that if you are on Mac and you're using h264 h265 and you're using the hardware accelerated encoding which instead of being a drop down selection it's just a checkbox there you want to uncheck the box that says optimize for Speed this results in really poor quality no matter what I do in all of my testing so uncheck that box the speed benefit it is not very worth it and it just makes it look worse I will say though on all platforms there is a box towards the top top called Network optimization this has minimal impact on the file itself but makes the it makes it stream a little bit faster if you're playing the video in a media player it lets it pick up a little bit quicker and seems to have a positive impact on improving your processing times when you upload it to YouTube I haven't seen any downside to this the upside is minimal if you don't mind waiting for processing on YouTube but I typically keep a check these days so go ahead and check that box on Mac you just have automatic quality on PC you need to select best quality which should be the default for the custom preset anyway let's just go ahead and make sure it's set to best quality and then for most people on the studio version you don't have this on the free version select the main tin profile this will export your video in 10-bit which is a color depth that is better than 8-bit which helps prevent banding and things like that now YouTube on their final trans codes that display to viewers and same thing with all social media platforms they use 8-bit which means that it's clamped back down but this gives you the best possible quality export so you have it to reference for later if you you know reference footage in your older video in your future videos and things like that gives you a kind of Master file that doesn't really need touched in the future you don't need to export prores anymore h265 10 bit is great for that but also kind of future proofs you a little because whenever YouTube does roll out 10 bit support with all their av1 rollouts and things like that they typically go back and reprocess older videos and your videos should see a bump from that I would give one caveat the only time I would recommend not using it and I don't even bother with it myself but it is annoying is if you're using if you're making videos that are exclusively screen captures because of the way YouTube clamps down the 10-bit to 8-bit for whatever reason my screen capture footage especially programs that are big gray uis like OBS dark mode DaVinci Resolve the Lewis Control Center and that microphone review I just did those videos frequently get these weird textures and patterns on the on the solid color gradients due to that clamping that doesn't really happen the same way if you just export the main profile which is 8-bit in the first place I just do 10 bit for everything and just deal although as a quality person that really irks me and so if I'm doing pure screen capture tutorials I will choose the main profile but I wanted to add that caveat there because it is really annoying and I've been trying to work with YouTube to fix this but we'll see you do have the option on some of these encoders to do a multi-passing code what this does is it encodes the video twice and chooses the most efficient use of bits for your footage of the two ways that it encodes it to give you a smaller file with the best quality possible the downside to this like it's good if you don't mind waiting on exports but the downside is it literally takes twice as long to encode so in most cases it's not worth it like you're not going to see inequality benefit and the file size difference is usually not super measurable or obvious but if you want to squeeze out the best efficiency or the best possible quality and you you're just letting renders go overnight or something anyway go ahead and check that box I use it sometimes especially on my Mac Studio where videos render super super fast anyway but go to the advanced settings below all of this and check the boxes for use render cache because if you use the render cache at that full size like I talked about in prores or dnxhr or cineform that will speed up your exports and use optimized media sometimes when you import a video that is a little too chunky or a Kodak like vp9 or something that doesn't play right on the timeline you can right click it and generate optimized media and using the settings we established at the start of the video it'll create a nice super silky to seek through and export prores dnxhr cineform file and then it can use that for the export which will speed things up as well you also want to change you for sizing and debaring to highest quality if you're worried about getting the highest quality this just affects the algorithms it uses for scaling up video and the way it debayers raw footage if you don't mess with raw footage it won't affect anything but it also won't hurt anything now if you're generating subtitles with the new resolve updates in resolve you can export those as a separate file from the timeline and I'll point you into the Mr Alex Tech video about that but you can also embed them in the file here I typically embed my markers and my subtitles in the file even though unfortunately YouTube will not pick these up at the moment but just so I have them for the future should I go back and re-edit the video or maybe YouTube supports it down the road or whatever I have this master file that has all of it baked into it so I don't have to do any of that work again later and this has saved me time already and again there's a little downside to including that and for things like my OBS course up at glitch.mov I embed the subtitles in the videos so people who download them can just view them in VLC or whatever their media players natively without needing a whole separate text document or anything like that it's super handy now for resolution I do recommend regardless of whether you're editing 1080p footage 1440p footage or whatever to export your video to 4K or 1440p ish to get better quality on YouTube there is no optimization you can get in your render settings to go past a specific quality level at 1080p on YouTube they just do not allocate enough bitrate in any codec people think that vp9 makes a difference for this it doesn't YouTube just doesn't give enough bits to 1080p for high action content like gaming or anything like sports anything like that to really look super great but upscaling that same high quality 1080p footage you recorded to 1440p or 4K gives you trans codes on YouTube that give you higher quality and higher bit rates allocated to it that will look better than just uploading native 1080p so I recommend even if you're editing 1880p timeline choose 4K as your export resolution here it'll give you a warning like hey you're not editing 4K are you sure you want to do this just click OK and you're going to get better quality on YouTube regardless I 100 recommend doing that it's been that way for years I try to mention it whenever I can but it's always a shock and a surprise for people because I guess it's not super intuitive now you can also export vertical formats Square formats and things like that here but you want to make sure your project and your timelines are set to those resolutions otherwise you're going to get weird pillar boxing and letterboxing because you didn't edit in a square or vertical timeline so if you want to make two different videos that way one that's widescreen and one for shorts or whatever then you need to duplicate your timeline in the media bin change that timeline to the vertical resolution make whatever resizing edits you want to make and then export that as vertical next we get to the big 18.6 update that I was so freaking excited for in the audio tab so again you do linear PCM audio to get uncompressed audio so that you never have to worry about the audio X you're exporting from resolve being crap YouTube gets the Twitter or whatever gets the best possible quality it can to work with to squish down on its own which is what you always want but you also have an option now I recommend 24 bit by the way just leave the other settings alone but you also have a new little pull down option now for audio loudness normalization this is super important YouTube by default if you upload a video if your video is too loud it will kind of Squish it down so that no one's videos are past a certain level to protect people's ears and try to make things a little bit more stable and whatever but on most mobile platforms and on desktop it doesn't do anything to bring that level up so if your video is too quiet it's just gonna be too quiet and this is a very common problem among new content creators Now TV and like some tablet platforms and stuff like that do have a new experimental option on YouTube that will bring it up but you want to be giving YouTube the most balanced audio you can so your audio your viewers aren't like cranking their volume up for your video and then getting blasted by another video or whatever audio loudness normalization on the export settings does this I typically had to use a bunch of limiters to like limit my audio right up against like -1 DB or something to do this but now you just check audio loudness normalization and choose YouTube from the doc drop down menu and you get your audio all of it brought up or down or both to average out around the -14 lufs which is just a loudness normalization standard for web content it does that automatically as it exports your video it does a first pass before it does the actual rendering part to analyze your audio and then squish it down or up to those levels that way your video is always a consistent Audio Level everyone needs to use this everyone needs to bake this into all other export presets there is no reason not to please please please do this and then of course save your preset I do recommend if you can exporting your final render to a different Drive than your cache or your Source footage is stored on even if it's a hard drive as long as it's not too slow that's fine ssds are always preferable these days but that should be fine most of your export bit rates aren't that fast anyway but having a separate drive again having your sources writing and reading from different places just gives your computer smoother throughput and allows things to run a lot more smoothly and then from there that's it you export your video and upload it and it should look freaking great again if you're on the free version you do have some limitations there that will limit your your quality overhead unless you're doing prores or DNX or something but you don't need to granularly tweak your bit rates or anything and resolve you just don't it looks great I test it with 4K 60 1080p 60 gameplay all the time my talking head my super color graded contrasty videos my VHS effect it always looks great when you use these settings and so this is what I recommend and to save you a bit of time for you Studio users out there I will have preset downloads available to you you may need to choose your specific graphics card encoder if you're on a different graphics card but then you just go to the three dots after you import it update it go to the three dots hover over the preset and update preset and now you have that available to you and now you can kick off those timeline renders directly from the edit tab without even having to go into go to the deliver tab anymore which saves you a lot more time in 18.6 on my Mac uh my exports seem to be running significantly faster and I can't exactly explain why there are notes in the patch notes that Nvidia users see 2x neural engine improvements and an AMD user c4x neural engine improvements which is like some of the processing for effects and things like that in 18.6 but nothing for Max specifically regarding that and yet my exports for the same footage I just exported my last mic review at are going a lot faster so that's very exciting Again download links for these presets if you want to use them um are in the description I don't like just making a video where I just say hey use these and then give you a download I want to teach you what the options are that way you understand better so that when you're tweaking it or whatever you're you're building your knowledge and actually making decisions based on what you want or need but also should you want to change something or something doesn't go quite how you want it to you have that option available to you because you understand what these things are I want to empower you to understand what you're doing with your Creative Tech instead of just giving you random settings like most people do if you want to learn more about optimizing DaVinci Resolve I do have a video over here from a few years ago that is still pretty relevant today there are some new settings that benefit this that I should probably do an update for and I'm thinking of doing a course either free on YouTube here with just high level stuff or more granular like my OBS course that is a paid access course you can vote for that in my Discord server ethosfox.gv Discord what I'm thinking to do in a full course soon because it's about time again I've been using resolve for a long time here I do hope you enjoyed go check out that optimization video go check out my recent mic review for an amazing microphone just as a demo and remember to Be Kind Rewind

Channel: EposVox

Views: 70,970

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve best render settings, davinci resolve render settings for youtube, davinci resolve 4k render settings, davinci resolve render settings, davinci resolve 18, mr alex tech, video editing, best render settings, best export settings davinci resolve 18, render settings, davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve export, davinci resolve 18 render settings, resolve loudness normalization, resolve -14 lufs

Id: AroeEgpwY7M

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023