AV1 exports coming out corrupt/pixelated and small

On Intel Arc gpu that supports AV1

While this would happen 1 on 10 times before, I get 5/5 on version 20

So 4k 30 fps 2 hour video on Constant QP comes out pixelated and 450mb in size. On intelligent constant quality: pixelated and 600MB. On Constant bitrate its 35GB in size , but at least its not currupt.

At the end of Davinci 19, I always got 3-4 GB sizes, non corrupt.


edit: In Constant bitrate I tried Balanced over Quality to maybe keep the size down, and got a 45GB file. Weird behavior

So I chatted with ChatGPT and it makes me realize higher QP is low quality, lower QP is better quality, and Davinci Resolve honors QP values this time; In Davinci Resolve 19, if QP was set to 255 in constant QP, Resolve would default on QP 20 or so, but in Resolve 20, it honors the values.

So I set constant QP to 25 and got a 45 GB file. But I need little 4-5 gb files.

I will now try QP 32 with Balanced preset. It is also suggested that Intelligent Constant quality at 28 will give me functionally sized files.

If you find this thread and have same problems with AV1, try the values you need and adjust for the long run

QP is the same across all encoding technologies.

Looking at the documentation, "Used by the Intelligent Constant Quality (ICQ) bitrate control algorithm. Values are in the 1 to 51 range, where 1 corresponds the best quality.".
It turns out that 255 was a valid QPI (ref). I imagine it'd give horrible quality though.

Since you have a filesize in mind, are you sure that you don't want an average bitrate?
The calculations are =(8000000*GB)/NUMBER_OF_SECONDS, for instance for 5 GB and 2 hours: 8000000*5/2*60*60 = 40000000/7200 = 5555Kb/s (as a total bitrate, subtract the audio bitrate to get video bitrate)

Consumer codecs in resolve have got no love from Black Magic. H.264/5 exports have a long history of corruption and inconsistent behavior. So I am not surprised to see the trend continue to AV1.

Export to Prores 422 or DnxHR HQX from Resolve and transcode to av1 with Handbrake.