No compression DV to H.264?

Hi All,

I'm new to DaVinci Resolve 17 and it seems to be a great application and I am enjoying using it.

I have been editing and rendering some DV video (captured using WinDV from 2003 The video was 720x576 25fps PAL DV format and it compressed quite well to H.264 (approximately 10:1).

However, I am now compressing some DV that's coming from a different camera 720x576 at 50fps PAL and I not seeing any compression at all really (or at least it seems that way).

How can this be? Any idea what may be causing it?

I've tried different encoding profiles (Auto and High) and uncheck "preserve encoding if possible" (although I don't think that would be possible from DV to H.264.

Aspect ratio is 4:3.

I know DV is pretty good compression but I was getting 10:1 and now practically nothing.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Cheers,
Ashley.

FYI:

The original video (that compressed well) came from a DV (miniDV) camera.
The DV video was format 720x576 25fps.

The video that is not compressing well comes from a Digital8 camera that also plays Video8/Hi8 analogue videos. The nice thing is that it also digitizes the video and outputs them as DV.
The DV video seems to be in 720x576 50fps format.

Normally I wouldn't complain about the higher fps but I am wondering if this is some sort of interlaced output and that is why double fps and compression is so poor.

I can't see anywhere I can modify things - the frame rate seems set/stuck at 50fps. I reduced the profile to Medium and got some compression (smaller by about 30%) but not 10:1.

Thanks for any suggestions.

From my viewpoint, this isn't something that really matters all that much. Can you expand a bit? What's the end goal here?

Resolve is really not the tool for quality transcodes. Use FFMPEG and learn the basics.

From my viewpoint, this isn't something that really matters all that much. Can you expand a bit? What's the end goal here?

Hi Jim, thanks for your post.

The end goal is to get good compression using the H.264 encoding included in Evolve.

I was just surprised by the lack of compression of this DV content when the earlier content compressed ok. I thought perhaps the shared wisdom of the group could advise me as to why compression was poor (possibly the 50fps interlacing?) and/or what I could do to improve it. There are lots of options for encoding and it's a lot to learn...

Cheers,
Ashley.

Resolve is really not the tool for quality transcodes. Use FFMPEG and learn the basics.

Hi Peter, thanks for your post.

I'm not a video professional, just a family man trying to process and save lots of old family videos. I will have a quick look but, to be honest, I don't have the time to get into FFMPEG. I was hoping that Evolve could do a reasonably good job for me and was just surprised as to why this second set of content didn’t compress.

Cheers,
Ashley.

Do you have an Nvidia card? If so, which one?

Or use a Handbrake preset. H264 quality vs file size is determined by the CRF/PQ value. 0 is best quality, 51 worst. Just pick the tradeoff you like. 21 may work.

The end goal is to get good compression

That's the part I'm thinking isn't terribly important most of the time. Why do the files have to be small?