Colour distortion with 10-bit recordings

Hi there,

I have been recording 10-bit clips with OBS using the colour format 10-bit P010, 4:2:0, 2 planes, combined with the colour space Rec. 709 and the encoder NVIDIA NVENC HEVC. Recording format is MP4.

The recorded files look fine in video players such as VLC player or Windows Media Player. However, when I drop the recorded clips in DaVinci Resolve (free version) and play them in the preview window, I get distorted colours for random parts of the clips (see screenshots of DaVinci timeline window below).

The first screenshot shows a frame of a clip where colours are fine, and a frame just a second later where colours have been randomly distorted.

When I export the clips, the colour distortions remain in the exported video file.

Has someone experienced this and is there a fix?

Thanks,
Christian

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Possibly you've recorded H.265 10bit which the Resolve Free version doesn't support. If that's the case you'll need the Studio version for that.

I should also note that if you're doing screen/desktop captures via OBS there is nothing to gain by recording in 10bit because the file being streamed to you is highly likely being played back in 8bit.

Thank you for your response!

Here are my OBS recording settings. Are any of these unsuitable for 10-bit? I'm still a bit new to this. (Have changed the settings to MKV video format in the meantime.)

I did notice that using the 10-bit P010 color format significantly improves the footage, particularly with regards to colour banding (e.g. sky footage). The improvement is visible both when watching the video on Desktop or uploading it on Youtube. Therefore, I would not want to go back to 8-bit.

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With some experimenting, I did find a workaround. Instead of recording in MP4, I now record in MKV and then run the footage through another program called Videopad, where I export it with maximum settings as an MKV video file. I then load this file into Davinci and render it as a MOV file which works perfectly fine, and I'm getting a clear 10-bit file rendered by Davinci without colour distortion. Not sure why this works, but it does.

But in the long run, I would like to avoid this workaround, so if anyone has an idea whether anything with my recording settings is suboptimal, please let me know.