Best video settings for uploading to Youtube, which will be read by DaVinci Resolve?

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krisbg

New Member
Hello,

I am using OBS for a first time, and was able to record my video + audio correctly with satisfying results. The video looks fine in VSC media player, and uploaded unedited to Youtube is also fine. I need to do some editing though, before uploading to Youtube, but when trying to open the videos from OBS with ACDSee Video Editor, the video looks mostly gray with only the moving parts shown close to correct, as if a wrong decoder is used. Then I decided to finally abandon my primitive editor and finally tried DaVinci Resolve, but there the things are even worse - it opened only the audio of the OBS outputs, and no video. So my question is for a recommendation of some working settings for video output from OBS, which will allow editing in Resolve. I would like to keep as much video quality as possible. Not sure whether that could matter, but my screen is 2K, which is not so standard resolution for video. Attached are images of my current OBS settings.
I spent a lot of time on creating a video, and am wondering also whether it would be possible to convert it to a readable format with minimal loss of quality, especially for the audio, instead of having to create it from scratch again. Any suggestions in that direction?

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Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
Why did you ignore the BIG warning about NOT recording to MP4 format?
And you ignored the pinned post in this forum (link in my .sig) about posting an OBS Studio log from a Recording and/or Streaming session of OBS Studio when asking for help

And why drop to a low-color format? why change default color space and color range... each of those can have significant implications
Also, recognize that editing a video is like the old school VHS copies impact. Each copy is a loss of quality. Video, due to its uncompressed size, is almost always (in a consumer scenario) compressed in a lossy format. Each re-encoded output (not necessarily editing session) is another LOSSY event. So, you typically want to Record at a higher quality level than you intend to upload/stream, so that after re-encoding, you are still within your desired quality level [this is true of all video editors... excluding something like AVIDEMUX which can trim without re-encoding]
 
K

krisbg

New Member
Lawrence_SoCal said:
Why did you ignore the BIG warning about NOT recording to MP4 format?
And you ignored the pinned post in this forum (link in my .sig) about posting an OBS Studio log from a Recording and/or Streaming session of OBS Studio when asking for help

And why drop to a low-color format? why change default color space and color range... each of those can have significant implications
Also, recognize that editing a video is like the old school VHS copies impact. Each copy is a loss of quality. Video, due to its uncompressed size, is almost always (in a consumer scenario) compressed in a lossy format. Each re-encoded output (not necessarily editing session) is another LOSSY event. So, you typically want to Record at a higher quality level than you intend to upload/stream, so that after re-encoding, you are still within your desired quality level [this is true of all video editors... excluding something like AVIDEMUX which can trim without re-encoding]
Click to expand...
Hello,
First thank you for replying! I apologize for not seeing the thread about the logs - I am quite busy and was in a hurry to ask without having the time to look around. Why should I not record in MP4? I tried also MKV and MOV containers but again the same happened. As for the low-color format I am not sure even with which settings I did that - maybe going to sRGB? I have much experience in digital photography, but with video I have very limited experience so it is possible that thinking that I am doing it for good, I am doing only harm, sorry. I completely understand that video is mostly lossy compressed and each new conversion deteriorates it, that's why I asked whether I should start the project from the beginning. I am not aware though about audio, and since my video is actually oriented around audio demos, I need it with the best possible quality. What is the recommended format for audio settings, so it doesn't get degraded during conversions - will FLAC be readable by Resolve?
 
K

krisbg

New Member
So I changed the following settings and now Resolve was able to open both video and audio even from a MP4 container. I am not sure which of these fixed it and am going to further test them one by one just to see which was the offender:

Bitrate changed to 2500 Kbps
Audio encoder changed to FFmpeg FLAC (16-bit)
Color space changed to Rec. 709
 
L

Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
That bitrate is WAY too low for quality video. I stream at 7mb/s and record at approximately 3X that
BUT.. you have a problem with that GPU and your settings as you are using CPU to encode video instead of offloading to the GPU (which AMD tends to suck at.. but there are ways, I've heard... for you to look into for your specific GPU to find recommendations
Historically, AMD appears to have largely ignored H.264 for H.265, but H.265 is a licensing mess, so not used in streaming world. BUT, when locally recording and planning to edit in Resolve, you might find AMD H.265 encoding works better in the end?? lots of variables, so not easy/quick/simple to test/confirm optimal settings for you. With that said, super late to the party, AMD recently (last 1-2 years, updated some software/API updates for H.264 encoding, so *IF* you are Recording and Streaming, and hardware resource constrained, you might want to see if H.264 would work for you. H.265 has newer, more CPU intensive compression, for smaller resulting files with same video quality.. but the issue comes into the maturity of that encoding... so one can't assume newer coder will be better, or less compression will be better.

Read the warning in OBS Studio about MP4 format... it is not a Record safe format... just don't...
auto-remux if need be (I'll leave it to you to research details on why)... that if using Recording in Resolve, no need to remux even

Seriously - first place to go to improve your results is to figure out if and then how to get GPU video encode offload working for you.
Though I'm curious why QuickSync (Intel) video encoding isn't listed in your log?
Why are you on Windows Version: 10.0 Build 19045 (release: 22H2). I get 24H2 is a bit of a hot mess at the moment (and wise to wait a few months at least), but a 2 yr old functional release in a Piece-of-S#$& operating system (Microsoft typical every other OS desktop release pattern for close to 25+ years)? you may have a good reason... or ?
 
K

krisbg

New Member
Lawrence_SoCal said:
That bitrate is WAY too low for quality video. I stream at 7mb/s and record at approximately 3X that
BUT.. you have a problem with that GPU and your settings as you are using CPU to encode video instead of offloading to the GPU (which AMD tends to suck at.. but there are ways, I've heard... for you to look into for your specific GPU to find recommendations
Historically, AMD appears to have largely ignored H.264 for H.265, but H.265 is a licensing mess, so not used in streaming world. BUT, when locally recording and planning to edit in Resolve, you might find AMD H.265 encoding works better in the end?? lots of variables, so not easy/quick/simple to test/confirm optimal settings for you. With that said, super late to the party, AMD recently (last 1-2 years, updated some software/API updates for H.264 encoding, so *IF* you are Recording and Streaming, and hardware resource constrained, you might want to see if H.264 would work for you. H.265 has newer, more CPU intensive compression, for smaller resulting files with same video quality.. but the issue comes into the maturity of that encoding... so one can't assume newer coder will be better, or less compression will be better.

Read the warning in OBS Studio about MP4 format... it is not a Record safe format... just don't...
auto-remux if need be (I'll leave it to you to research details on why)... that if using Recording in Resolve, no need to remux even

Seriously - first place to go to improve your results is to figure out if and then how to get GPU video encode offload working for you.
Though I'm curious why QuickSync (Intel) video encoding isn't listed in your log?
Why are you on Windows Version: 10.0 Build 19045 (release: 22H2). I get 24H2 is a bit of a hot mess at the moment (and wise to wait a few months at least), but a 2 yr old functional release in a Piece-of-S#$& operating system (Microsoft typical every other OS desktop release pattern for close to 25+ years)? you may have a good reason... or ?
Click to expand...
Thank you for replying again. So with bitrate changed to 2500 Kbps, audio encoder changed to FFmpeg FLAC (16-bit), color space changed to Rec. 709, video encoder changed to AOM AV1, Color Range set to "Limited" and some other changes I was able to make it readable in Resolve and the video quality seems to be satisfying.
Now on your questions: seems like my Radeon RX 6400 graphics card doesn't support hardware video encoding, so no hope in that direction. I should have bought an NVidia 1650 instead, but I rarely encode videos, and since that was not a priority for me, I overlooked the lack of video encoding on the 6400. My Intel integrated UHD 770 might be disabled from device manager to avoid conflicts with the discrete card, that's why it doesn't appear as an option. I will check it once I get home. Should it give better results than the software H264 option?
For Windows version I am not sure why - updates are not disabled and I get some from time to time, but somehow this update seems to have been missed. I will try to update it manually, also considering finally giving up and going to Win11 for better handling of performance cores, which might be helpful for music production software.
As for MP4 vs MKV I left it to MP4 because my old video editing software was able to read MP4s for sure, while not sure about MKV, and also I am recording my videos in short scenes, so even losing one scene is not fatal. I might use MKV in future projects though, just wondering whether the remux process causes video quality degradation?
 
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Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
Would Intel QuickSync be better? maybe... depends, you'll have to test. To me, the bigger issue is preventing CPU overload. And if editing/re-encoding, I Record at a higher bitrate to start... presuming you have disk space and available Disk I/O.

OBS Studio's auto-remux simply changes the file wrapper (from MKV to MP4 in this case) and does NOT re-encode, so absolutely no change in quality. on my SATA SSD, an 11GB files takes about 15 seconds to remux (check to make if you need to delete the original MKV recording)
 
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