Problem with grain and artifacting

Hi all,

I am new to using Resolve abeit I have done my research to try and figure this out before posting. I am importing 1080p mp4 videos, then editing within reslove and when I render them they end up with a fair amount of grain, especially once posted to youtube. I am rendering using the following settings: youtube 1080p, mp4 H.264, res: 1920 x 1080, frame rate matched to clips, I've tried quality at both auto and restricting to 30000 kb/s and everything else is left default. Does anyone know what I can do to get the same quality out as the clips I am putting in? Thanks.

Are tou sure it is not YouTube's fault?

I believe that Resolve uses the windows h.264 export .dlls and is well documented on this forum to have pretty poor encoding for h264. Myself and others export a file to a DNX variant then use a 3rd party app such as myffmpeg to render a better quality h.264 file. And then YouTube will again recompress it again.

There are theories out there that no matter what you upload to YouTube, they're going to re-encode it anyway.

Three things you can try:

1) upload ProRes 422 and let YouTube re-encode that and see what happens.

2) create a 4K version of the project and then let YouTube encode that and hope it gives you more bandwidth than the HD version.

3) Go to a higher-bandwidth site like Vimeo Pro and use that instead.

Nick, like you I edit 1080 50p mp4 video and upload to YouTube. Even though I upload at the original file bit rate of 35Mbps, the re-encoding by YT to a lower bit rate introduces blocking artifacts if you have noise in the picture. I have done some tests outputting the HD as 4k and uploading that. YT gives more bandwidth to 4k and this seems to stop the artifacts.
As an aside, I have not had Resolve introduce any noise into the picture that was not already there.

There are theories out there that no matter what you upload to YouTube, they're going to re-encode it anyway.

Three things you can try:

1) upload ProRes 422 and let YouTube re-encode that and see what happens.

2) create a 4K version of the project and then let YouTube encode that and hope it gives you more bandwidth than the HD version.

3) Go to a higher-bandwidth site like Vimeo Pro and use that instead.

These are not theories- it's FACT
Another FACT is that youtube bitrates are fairly low so grainy/noisy videos will look blocky (like in this case).

I've tried quite a lot of the things Andrew and other have suggested like reverting to source footage before render. Various handbrake attempts et etc.

it seem like YT and Vimeo really compress, especially fast moving sceens. Of course filming with a gopro is not the best start...

Best thing is to move 2 steps back from the screen, not so bad then.....

Stop fighting with something which you have no direct control over.
Don't try to take those "great looking videos" as reference. They do look good because they were shot on good cameras with very film alike style. You can always (well- problem is that in most cases you can't) shoot like this also and it will help.

You can do only few things which are in your control (assuming you are already uploading decent master not some already over-compressed crap):
- upload UHD for bit better quality on UHD encodes
- shot on good camera with shallow depth of field (if you can)
- de-noise footage (just don't over do it as then it's also crap)
- upload fake 50/60p ( 25/30p with repeated frames) to get better bitrates (it won't really make your footage higher fps)
- use other hosting website which allow for better quality

This is about it.