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Best encoder - Premiere Pro 2018 or DaVinci Resolve 16


Oscar Petersson

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I have a prores file that needs some editing and then I will make a new prores master and from there make a mp4 file.

For the editing I can use either, so which encoder you think gives the best result, Premiere Pro 2018 or DaVinci Resolve 16?

Or maybe it doesn't matter?

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For prores encoding it really doesn't make a difference - just use what's convenient for you.

For h264, people have opinions on this.  I personally am happy with Adobe and have my settings dialed in there.

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Davinci is really great with ProRes and we haven't have had any problems with ProRes.

But h.264 is a different story. We've had to export a lot beefier files to get the same result as we did in Premiere Pro.

In the end it really doesn't matter. Whatever you have on hand. I use Davinci since we switched a few years ago.

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36 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

MPEG GPU encoding is different quality than CPU encoding. Resolve does a better job over-all in my opinion. 

I agree about Davinci being better. I actually can't even work in Premiere anymore, especially color grading.

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OK, thanks guys. good stuff. I'll probably use DaVinci then for the ProRes master.

What about using Handbrake to encode the mp4/h.264 if i use the ProRes master?

Can it even compare to Premiere or DaVinci? The reason why im thinking Handbrake is that I may wanna export it as an .mkv file, and I find it easier to import the subtitles in Handbrake...

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5 hours ago, Raymond Zananiri said:

from my experience the h264 and h265 output from Handbrake is far superior to Resolve's output of the same codecs. If you want the best quality h264 files, deliver your timeline from Resolve in prores or dnxhd and use that in Handbrake for a h264 conversion. 

I've experienced this also. For some reason if I use Handbrake to convert a ProRes master into h.264 it will be more compressed but better quality than if I export in Resolve. 

I have no idea why.

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23 hours ago, Raymond Zananiri said:

from my experience the h264 and h265 output from Handbrake is far superior to Resolve's output of the same codecs. If you want the best quality h264 files, deliver your timeline from Resolve in prores or dnxhd and use that in Handbrake for a h264 conversion. 

I've never had a single problem with Resolve encoding. I think a lot of problems come from licensed and unlicensed versions of Resolve. It also depends a lot on your GPU. The media engine on older GPU's kinda sucks and Resolve is heavily GPU dependent. There are so many variables from two pass encoding to bit rate of course. I have a resolve license, I use Apple products with modern AMD GPU's. The output is always stellar, no way it could be any better. 

This is a "default" output from Resolve, .h264 DCI-P3 color space and true DCI 4k format. You can even see the film grain, it looks great! No smoothing issues, no bit depth or bit rate issues, so common with variable bitrate files. I can't imagine it needing to look better than this. 
 

 

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