Low quality export - 1440P worse than 1080P Original

I have been having trouble with Davinci Resolve 17 free where the export quality is poor in 1440P compared to the 1080p preview in the editor.

I have taken screenshots of my settings.

I hope you don't mind the cannabis pictures. It is legal in my area for both recreational and medical, the latter of which I am certified.

The image on the left is 1080P in-editor with color adjustments while the image to the right is the 1440P export.

DV COMPARISON MASTER 2.jpg (1013.96 KiB) Viewed 1807 times

It is worse looking exported in 1440P than the original in 1080P on this 1440P monitor.


Here are my settings:

DaVinci Comparison 2.jpg (69.52 KiB) Viewed 1807 times

DaVinci Comparison 3.jpg (75.68 KiB) Viewed 1807 times

I need another post for the other screenshots.

Try using Quality> Automatic/Best setting. If you want to restrict the bitrate try a lower setting, 800Mbs is extremely high. 100Mbs should be more than enough.

I'd export in DNxHR and do the final encoding in Handbrake. Its x.264 is as good as it gets.

Thank you. I'll try this.

Are you sure you are exporting 1440P? Your settings show UHD 2160.
Mac versions of Resolve output good quality MP4 or H264 files but some Windows users have reported poor quality from the Resolve encoder.

I have a bad memory. I believe I was encoding to 4K for the future and to ensure 1440P quality on my current monitor.

It seems it is impossible to achieve 1440P quality through my custom 1440P and 4K exports. The quality is no different.

When I use a cheap video editor, my 1440P exports look better than their 1080P source material. I do not understand how Resolve can be so professional and yet be unable to match the quality of a $60 editor.

Something is not right. Is it really true that this program is useless for Windows? If 1440P isn't 1440P quality like it is in Videopad in the good exports and my old Iphone's 30 FPS video comes out terrible in the bad exports how am I supposed to function?

Premiere looks horrible, Resolve looks horrible... and Videopad not only is a very big disappointment in color adjustments, it is failing to render AT ALL now!

This is ******* hell.

Also, it is amazing how the 1440P exports are bigger, take more time to render and yet are no better than 1080P.

What do you expect? 1080p is the amount of information you have. 1440 is just scaling it up, but how can it be better? Please understand that some programs are giving you a fake impression of sharpness or detail by enhancing edges. DR can do that too (Color page), but it's no new information.
SuperScale (Studio only) is doing it pretty well, but again: no new information,

The only software I know that can invent new detail to some degree is A.I. based. One example is Video Enhancer AI, which is pretty good at scaling up natural textures, but not that great with people or buildings. Oh, and it's slow.

And, finally, you are probably working with highly compressed sources. Scaling these up means scaling up compression artefacts too, so they get more obvious.